


Rogue Pawn, Grey Castle

by inkystars



Category: Glee
Genre: Alternate Universe - James Bond, F/F, F/M, M/M, Scenes of a sexual nature - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-10-18
Updated: 2014-11-13
Packaged: 2018-02-21 14:21:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 36,508
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2471354
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inkystars/pseuds/inkystars
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sequel to Black Queen, White Rook. After double-oh agent Blaine Anderson was forced to listen to his fiance’s brutal murder over the coms in Q Branch, a Quartermasterless MI6 has spent the better part of a year at the forefront of a vicious cyber attack from a shadowy villain who only refers to their self as “Atlas”, not to mention the return of long-thought-dead notorious hacker Eris, and a curious nameless code writer who may or may not be an ally.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Chapter 1**  

_They’d been fighting._

_That was something that Blaine would never forgive himself for--that before everything had gone down, they had been in a fight. And it wasn’t even over anything consequential, in the grand scheme of things. Given the nature of their occupations, their fight could’ve been about international secrets or distrust between each other and the way they had to act with other agents or even their sex life, as seemed elementary with other couples._

_No, of all the things they could have fought about, it had to have been **food**. _

***

“007, report,” Kurt said evenly into the general vicinity of his wired desk. He sat perfectly still in his plexiglass chair, typing nondescriptly on his tablet. 

“007 here,” Blaine’s voice came across the com, blaring into the room for all to hear. “I’ve entered the building. Incapacitated two guards on the first floor. Going to need to go silent from here on up.”

“Very good,” Kurt nodded, though Blaine couldn’t see him. “I’ll guide you through.” He set his tablet down and returned to his laptop, hacking into the CCTV cams within Blaine’s hotel in Dusseldorf. 

It had been a hellish month and a half of guiding Blaine as he crawled his way across Germany (scaling part of the Alps and literally dipping into the Danube at one point) to find the perpetrator of a trafficking ring. 004 and 006 had been on the mission for seven months prior already, and 007 had been sent in to help wrap up, so naturally everything had gone to hell.

Kurt pushed up his white glasses to rub at his eyes briefly before concentrating on the cams, bringing up the schematics of the building on another screen. “There seems to be a safe room on the fourth floor behind the wall adjacent from the window. Sixteen meters down the hall from you a man is waiting around the corner with a knife.” He watched as Blaine took down the target with his Walther PPK, effortlessly and silently thanks to Kurt’s modifications to the weapon. 

His attention switched to the third floor where two guards turned, apparently reacting to the sound of the guard downstairs falling. “Take the elevator, two guards are heading down the stairs--” So, naturally, Blaine took the stairs and their was a hail of bullets. “Remember that you’re low on ammo. There should be an extra clip in the lining of that jacket, and if anyone else touches the gun it’ll send an electric shock that will knock them out. But remember, if you go that route it’ll need at least twenty seconds to get the charge back.” 

Blaine didn’t reply but checked down the hall of the third floor furtively, making sure he wasn’t going to be ambushed, before heading up to the fourth. 

“Six guards in the hallway,” Kurt said, frowning as he leaned forward. “They heard the other guards’ guns. “I can cut the electricity, if that would be helpful.” 

On his screen, Blaine tapped his hip once. Yes. 

“Alright, flip on your infrared goggles,” Kurt said as he eased his way into the building’s circuits. “On my count.”

Blaine didn’t move.

Kurt blinked. “007, did you loose your infrared goggles?”

One tap. Yes.

“Then I won’t cut--”

Two taps. No.

Kurt sighed. “If you say so. Three. Two. One.” 

He cut the power. 

Blaine took out his earwig.

An outraged snarl furled up in Kurt’s throat, but he bit it back, sitting against his chair in bitter fury. The only power he left in the building was to the CCTV cams, but a fat lot of good that did him, with everything dark and no audio to accompany. So he sat there at his laptop, fingers poised over the keys incase they were called at a moment’s notice. 

The minutes stretched on, but he stayed perfectly still. 

At nine minutes thirty eight seconds, the chirp of Blaine’s com coming back online rang through the bullpen like a gunshot, but Kurt didn’t so much as flinch. “Objective achieved. You can turn the lights back on.”

Kurt did, his shock at the red across the walls only reflecting in a startled blink before he slid back into neutral. He clicked open his previously stalled instant messages between his department and shot off a quick demand for a status report to Mike. “Very good. You’ll rendezvous with 004 in three hours. 006 should be getting in from Moscow shortly after and--” He scanned the flight information Mike sent him. “--you’re all scheduled on the 22:45 flight out of Berlin tonight.”

“Noted. 007 signing off.”

Kurt straightened his shoulders before bringing up the flight and travel information for the three double-oh agents across his screens. “Mike,” he called out after switching off his comm. “I’ll take over 006’s transport.”

“Very good, Quartermaster,” Mike nodded, sending over all the relevant information. 

Kurt sighed, leaning forward. “And if it’s not too much of an inconvenience, could I trouble you for a refill of my coffee? Very black?”

“Of course,” Mike said with a friendly smile, walking up to accept Kurt’s outstretched coffee mug, eager to leave the bull pin for the first time in five hours during his long thirty hour shift. 

In the hallway he almost ran headlong into 003, taking a surprised step back and apologizing.

“It’s nothing,” she laughed, tucking her long back hair behind her left ear and sending Mike a charming smile. He tried not to blush--all the double-oh agents were notorious flirts, but he’d always had a soft spot for 003. “I was just going to get outfitted early for Sydney--”

“Don’t!” Mike said, grabbing her arm. He let go of it quickly when she raised an imposing eyebrow at him. “It’s just...” He glanced over at the Q Branch door, trying to think of a tactful way to explain his predicament. “I’m getting Q coffee.”

003’s eyebrow raised further.

“Black.”

Her expression dropped in sudden understanding. “Oh god, they’re  _fighting_?” 

***

“So, you and Q are fighting, huh?”

Blaine’s jaw tensed as he stared resolutely ahead at the back of the seat in front of him in first class. He ignored Sebastian’s breath tickling his ear and instead devoted his entire attention to the slideshow of pictures across the screen in the back of the seat. Bermuda, Bangkok, Budapest--

Jesse’s head popped up from the seat in front of him, effectively ruining his attempt at indifference. “Wait, how can you tell?”

Sebastian snorted. “There’s only two times Q’s been too pissed off to remember that he has a perpetual vendetta against me. And since 005’s been in Detroit for over nine months in deep cover, the only other option is that Blainey Boy here set him off. He was borderline civil getting me back to Berlin.”

“He could have just been distracted,” Jesse shrugged. “I mean it wouldn’t be the first time.”

“Yeah, but Blaine was the one distracting him that time,” Sebastian smirked. “In the flesh. Besides, have you ever known Blaine to get on an airplane without calling or getting a call from our beloved Quartermaster?”

Jesse paused, frowning. “Actually, come to think of it--”

“Not once,” Sebastian said with a delicious grin, moving to plop into the seat next to Blaine. “Because Q’s afraid of flying, the spineless little sniv--” He jumped out of the seat to avoid the sharp blow Blaine dealt out. 

“And who’s fault is that?” Jesse rolled his eyes as he replaced Sebastian’s seat, flipping his legs over the armrest and into the aisle. It was fortunate that MI6 had bought out the entirety of first class for them--probably knowing that putting three of the most volatile double-oh agents on an airplane together was a recipe for disaster--so they could have this conversation. “Weren’t you the one who had him handcuffed with a gun to his head the  _first time_ he was on an airplane?”

“Semantics,” Sebastian shrugged.

“Didn’t you also  _stab him_ as the airplane was falling apart, right before he went into free fall and almost broke every bone in his body?” 

“Whatever, it’s not like anyone died that night.”

“There were eight casualties.”

“We’re getting off topic,” Sebastian said smoothly, mirroring Jesse’s position in the seat across the aisle. 

“There was one to begin with?”

“Yes, 7 and Q’s radio silence. We can’t have Mummy and Daddy fighting, now can we?”

“I thought M was mum.”

“Okay, Cool Gay Uncle and Lame Gay Uncle. As insufferable as they are together on a daily basis, HQ is just so much more depressing and tense when they aren’t speaking to each other.” 

Jesse raised an eyebrow. “Wait, are you openly admitting that you want to fix whatever’s wrong with 7 and Q?”

“Not really, I’m more trying to get a rise out of Galatea over there.” Sebastian cocked his head to the side to regard Blaine. “Seriously? Nothing to weigh in on the subject, Anderson?”

Blaine closed his eyes briefly before turning to look at the two far-too curious agents to his right. “I quite frankly don’t see how it’s either of your business.” He took out his headphones and stuck them into his ear, looking out over the channel. 

Jesse turned back to Sebastian. “Christ, what happened with those two?”

***

Kurt got off the tube just after midnight, following the thick stream of Friday night party-goers up the steps before breaking off to the left to head to his apartment. He seriously questioned the fact that he lived six stories up in a building with a broken lift before shaking his groggy head and trekking up the stairs. 

By the time he finally reached the sixth floor, he was having trouble focusing on his key, and the fingertips of his left hand were feeling a bit numb like they did whenever he wasn’t careful with the upkeep of his shoulder. After finally managing to slide it into the lock (and taking a little longer with the other three) he pushed his door open and used his exhausted weight to press it closed, leaning his head against the grainy wood as he reached up and slid each lock into place. 

“I’ll never understand how you won’t let me have a flat unless its outfitted with the latest in cyber security and insulation, and yet you have a drafty loft with four highly pickable locks.”

Kurt felt a smile tug at his lips in spite of himself. He turned around lazily, leaning back against the door as he regarded the bruised double-oh agent who was lazing across his chaise. “Well what’s the point when I have a licensed-to-kill boyfriend keeping watch?”

That managed to tug the corner of Blaine’s lips up a fraction. “You look exhausted.”

“You look like you should be in Medical,” Kurt shot back. “Or, more correctly, you  _should_ be at the airport right now, being picked up along with 004 and 006.”

“Well I’ve never been one for the rules, have I?” Blaine sighed, stretching with a groan, Kurt’s drawn schematics that littered the chaise crinkling under his body. 

Clenching his jaw, Kurt pushed off of the door, arms crossed. “That’s putting it lightly.”

Blaine glanced over at him, expression smoothing over. “You’re mad.”

“You took me out of your ear.”

“You didn’t need to hear all of the gory details,” Blaine grimaced. “Literally.”

“Yes I do, Blaine, it’s my goddamned  _job_ ,” Kurt snapped tersely, dropping his back and coat before marching stiffly over to the small kitchen, turning on the kettle. “I know that you suddenly don’t trust me to do what I’m  _supposed_ to do--”

“Oh stop the melodramatics, I  _do_ trust you.” Blaine pushed off of the chaise far too easily for someone who looked as injured as he. “I’m just worried is all--”

“Well there’s no need, I’m perfectly fine--”

“You don’t eat, Kurt.”

Kurt rounded on him. “I don’t see how you could possibly make that wild assumption given that you’ve been gone for nearly seven weeks.”

“That’s why you’re here, isn’t it?” Blaine asked. “Too many cyber interfaces at my apartment, all of which keep track of everything that goes in and out, from fridge weight and content to everyone who comes and visits, take-out delivery included. And I can check those interfaces at any time, so it’s easier to just come here--”

“Well that’s a nice theory, but it just so happens that I think better alone here,” Kurt countered. “Not to mention--”

“And I asked your staff.”

Kurt stopped short, eyes widening. “You did  _what_?”

Blaine had the decency to at least pause before continuing. “I had a hunch so I asked a few if they ever saw you eat and all of them said that you only ever had caffeinated drinks.” 

“You asked my  _staff_?  _My_ staff?” Kurt clenched his teeth so hard that he thought he might crack a filling. 

“And there’s  _nothing_  in your fridge,” Blaine continued, growing steam as Kurt withdrew into an icy fury. “And expired cans in your cupboard, Kurt. You shouldn’t be--”

“I shouldn’t? I  _shouldn’t_? It’s not up to you to dictate what I should and shouldn’t do, Blaine!” Kurt snapped, the forgotten kettle whistling in the background as soundtrack to his ire. “You don’t just get to swoop back in after seven weeks--seven weeks of you breaking  _every_ rule, I might add--and then just start back up exactly where you left off saying that there’s some specific food quota that I apparently have to fill to be your boyfriend--”

“You’ve lost almost twenty pounds since I saw you last!” Blaine yelled over him. “It’s not healthy--”

“Oh, I’ll tell you what’s not healthy! Coming home after missions that’ve gone wrong and drinking yourself into a three-day stupor just to cope!”

“That’s just about as healthy as trying to stay awake in seventy hour stints after M’s  _ordered_ you home! That’s  _literally_ working yourself to death.”

“Yeah, well, you’ll still beat me, given that your job promises an early grave in its job description!”

The sudden silence between the two was ringing. 

And then Blaine unholstered his gun, and set it on the counter along with his small radio, a jammer, and a multipurpose matchbox. “I’ve turned in my kit. Will there be anything more, Quartermaster?”

Kurt didn’t even look at it. “That will be all, 007.” 

He didn’t turn to look when Blaine left either. 


	2. Chapter 2

Chapter 2 

***

Kurt curled up in his bed miserable that night. It wasn’t that he liked fighting with his boyfriend, or even wanted to. Quite the opposite. He loved Blaine dearly and wanted nothing more than to be home with him, proper home, cuddled up in their ostentatious yet well-loved bed. He wanted to be streaming Netflix to catch up on their shows together with whatever still-open takeout place was the fastest to deliver. He wanted to not even think about sex as he and Blaine would pass out sleepily from exhaustion and not go to work the next day before noon so that they could reacclimatize themselves to being back on Kurt and Blaine time rather than Quartermaster and 007 time. 

And Blaine was wrong. Well, half-wrong. It’s not that Kurt was actively trying to avoid eating or anything. And if he was trying to hide it, he could easily hack into the systems in Blaine’s apartment and alter them to make it look like he’d been keeping a regular eating schedule. 

But the truth of the matter was, the large king bed felt a bit too lonely when Blaine was gone for too long, and he hated facing it alone. He hated _being_ in the apartment when Blaine was in the field, far preferring to stay late at Q Branch, taking fast cat naps during down hours and focusing on his job, rather than frivolous things like going home. And he especially disliked being in it when they were both fighting. 

There were expectations on both of their shoulders. At nineteen and twenty-two, they were the youngest agents within their fields in MI6 and that came with a lot of doubt. Blaine had easily slid into his role before effectively betraying everyone two years prior, but he quickly returned to good graces. Kurt, on the other hand, was the one watched carefully. He’d been the one to slaughter and entire division of cyber defenses at MI6 without batting an eyelash. He was the outsider, the foreigner, the one who clearly had little regard for queen and country.

The one who was only along for the ride with his boyfriend. 

Kurt’s eyes physically started to hurt from the effort to keep them open, so he let them slide shut, welcoming sleep.

***

“You look like shit.”

Blaine raised an eyebrow at Tina as he left M’s office. “It’s good to see you too, Cohen-Chang.” 

“Cut the crap, Anderson. The whole offices knows.”

“Of course they do,” Blaine groaned.

Tina crossed her arms as they walked down to the armory. “Don’t you think that whatever’s going on between the two of you, it’s probably not worth it in the long run?”

“Don’t any of you think that whatever’s going on between me and Q, it’s not up to the rest of you to butt in?” Blaine shot back.

“Of course it is,” Tina rolled her eyes. “No one can resist secrets here. It’s literally in our job description.”

“What’s your point?” Blaine sighed. 

“My point...” Tina turned, stepping in front of him and barring his way. “Is that we’re all supposed to keep secrets from each other, Blaine. And we’re all naturally wired to figure out what each others’ are. So don’t let it get between you and Q, alright?”

There was a snappy comeback on his lips about to whip out before he paused, considering her words. “I know,” he said quietly. “It’s just--”

“That you worry about him,” she nodded. “I know. We all know. But you need to realize that we _all_ do. Okay, maybe not Crawford because he’ll hold that grudge ‘til he dies, but the rest of us do. Even Smythe, though he’d never admit it. Q is the one who gets all of us home safe and he’s done a hell of a better job than his predecessor. We’re spies, we know how to slip vitamin supplements into his tea when he isn’t looking. So maybe you shouldn’t worry as much and think about the other ways in which this could manifest instead of just getting into fights with him, huh?”

“I know,” Blaine sighed. “But it just gets so frustrating, because it’s like he’s trying to work himself into an early grave with me. And I’ve been doing this longer, I know my limits. But I don’t think he knows his.”

“Still a cute mental image though,” Tina shrugged. “Who knows, maybe you could get ‘Messrs. Worried Sick With Love’ carved into your matching tombstones.” 

Blaine frowned, the fragment of a thought whispering through his mind. He then froze, his eyes widening as a wonderful _terrible_ idea filled his head.

“No,” Tina said quietly. “No no no, I know that look. The last time I saw that look on your face, you and Jesse nearly blew up the Czech embassy.”

“No no, this is way better,” Blaine said quietly, a grin slowly creeping on his face.

“That does very little to console me.”

“Put it out of mind,” Blaine grinned, straightening for a salute. “Thank you, 003. This has been most enlightening.”

“Oh, for the love of--”

But Blaine had already turned down the hallway.

***

“A mission?” Kurt’s eyebrows shot up in surprise. “For me?”

“Yes,” Carmen said, handing Kurt the file over her desk. “Nothing high profile and flashy, obviously. But we’re outfitting a new branch in Paris, and we need a small team to go in to do on site cyber security to make sure that the location is secure from a technological standpoint before continuing.”

“That shouldn’t be too hard,” Kurt frowned, flipping through the file. “Any reason why I specifically have to be there? R’s more than capable, and you know I don’t care for flying.”

“Paragraph eleven.”

Kurt flipped to the third page, scanning before he paused in interest. “You want it virtually invisible? Not just murmuring fake traffic.”

Carmen nodded.

A smile crept onto Kurt’s face. “Well that is interesting then. I’ll need to go by train, of course. And R should stay in charge in my absence.”

“That should be easy enough to arrange. You’ll be assigned a field agent, of course, as well as two guards, but it shouldn’t be any more than a 72 hour mission. Do you have a preference in a field agent?”

Kurt opened his mouth, the obvious answer on his tongue, but he hesitated. It had been over a week now since Blaine had returned from Germany, and he’d yet to say a word to him. So it was probably best not to force the issue.

“Whoever’s most convenient,” he said evenly, scanning through his mental roster of the agents who were currently home and out of Medical. “002, perhaps?”

She raised an eyebrow, but didn’t comment. “I’ll make the arrangements. You’ll leave in 48 hours.

Kurt nodded, ignoring the lump in his throat as he left M’s office.

***

Kurt was fetching the last of his kit from the armory two days later, when his phone pinged. Pulling it out with a frown, he glanced at the message--that someone was in his office--and sighed, heading back up to Q Branch.

His office sat there innocently, with no sign of intrusion, but he knew better. Keying in the code, he pushed the door open. “What are you doing in here, 007?”

Blaine was sitting on his desk, playing with one of Kurt’s little black glass boxes that made up part of the raised chessboard he was designing. He was also looking very fetching in a tuxedo, once of his nicer ones, if Kurt wasn’t mistaken. An easy smile played at his lips when he looked up as Kurt shut the door. “Why I’m taking my Quartermaster out for dinner, of course.”

Kurt blinked. “I...I...” He cleared his throat. “I can’t.”

“Oh come on,” Blaine grinned, sliding off Kurt’s desk. “Your interns can watch 008’s movements, that’s what they’re there for. ”

“No,” Kurt shook his head. “I mean, I can’t. I’m leaving.”

“Leaving?” Blaine frowned, stepping forward. “What do you mean _leaving_?”

“I got an assignment,” Kurt shrugged, moving forward and putting his kit down on his desk. “In the field. I leave in two hours.”

“In the field?” Blaine said sharply. “Wait, why wasn’t I informed?”

“Because you aren’t on the mission,” Kurt said calmly, firmly dodging the unasked question.

“What do you mean I’m not on the mission?” 

“I mean that it will be me, 002, and a team of guards.”

“You _hate_ flying.”

“Which is why we’re taking the train,” Kurt sighed, collecting items from around the room and resolutely _not_ looking at his boyfriend. “It’s just for a few days, probably four at the absolute most--”

“Why didn’t _you_ tell me?”

Kurt stopped, his fingers stilling before he turned to face Blaine. “Is there really a point?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” 

“It means that I hadn’t heard from you in over a week so I didn’t know if you...if you even _wanted_ to be informed or--”

“Of course I do,” Blaine said bewilderedly. “I...had to do something this week, official business--”

“No it wasn’t, I checked your log. You had nothing up and you went completely off the grid,” Kurt said in a clipped voice, the tension that had been their all week, pooling at the base of his spine, steadily starting to grow and seep into his veins. 

“Checking up on me, Quartermaster?” Blaine raised an eyebrow.

“It wouldn’t do well for MI6 to loose track of one of its top agents,” Kurt countered. “Just doing my job.” 

That earned him a chuckle. “Fine, you caught me. I had to get something a bit more...well, personal, one might say,” Blaine smiled.

Kurt glanced back down at his kit, trying to ignore the nausea that settled in his stomach, and in that moment he missed the split-second look that Blaine sent the boxes on Kurt’s desk. 

“Well,” Kurt cleared his throat. “I’ll be in Paris for the next three days. Afterwards I think we should maybe have a talk.”

Blaine’s eyes caught his sharply. “A talk?” he repeated. 

“Yes,” Kurt nodded. “About our relationship. Both of them--professional and personal.”

Blaine opened his mouth before he stopped, and sighed, and shook his head. “I hope you have a good time in Paris, Q.” 

“Thank you, 007,” Kurt replied. 

Blaine walked over, pausing on his way to the door to give Kurt a quick kiss on the cheek. Kurt leaned into it, closing his eyes, and then Blaine was gone, out the door. 

Kurt opened his eyes and went over to his desk, looking down at the little black glass box that Blaine had been playing with. He picked it up, setting it in his kit. He tried to convince himself that he was only taking it to test some of the net seeds inside on the new Parisian system, even though he knew that that was mostly untrue.

***

“Um, 007?”

Blaine looked over from his punching bag to see Mike Chang--Kurt’s right hand and current lead of Q Branch since Kurt’s departure to Paris two days prior--standing awkwardly next to the adjacent bag, looking wholly out of place in the gym with his stiff button-up and pleated pants. “Yes?”

“Q’s on the line, in his office. He says that it’s urgent.”

A thousand scenarios of Paris suddenly catastrophically being destroyed shot through Blaine’s head like wildfire and then he was moving, pushing past Mike as left the gym, pace growing faster as he made his way up to Q Branch. 

It was hardly a rare sight to see a double-oh agent storm through the bullpen to get to Q’s office, so no one looked up as Blaine passed the rows of gray desks, thumbing in the key code and opening the door sharply. 

“This is a secure line,” Kurt’s voice rang through the room as soon as he shut the door. 

Blaine stopped dead, confused as the adrenaline pumped through his veins. “Are you alright?”

“Well that remains to be seen,” Kurt said dryly, and Blaine let out a breath because a crisis was averted. “Blaine, do you know what I keep in those little chess squares that I’ve been developing?”

Blaine raised an eyebrow at the sudden line of questioning as he sat down in Kurt’s desk chair. “Those weird little hacker ball things, right? The ones that look like teardrop pin ends?”

“They’re called net seeds, but yes, essentially. Now I’m curious as to how you know that, since they’re a personal project that I started two months ago and I’ve never shown them to you.”

Blaine felt a twinge of guilt trickle down his spine before he smoothed it over. “I’m sure that you told me about them in passing once or twice...”

“While you were in Germany and it was almost impossible to maintain a secure line?”

Ah, right. “What exactly are you getting at, Kurt?”

There was a brief silence. “Well, I decided to bring some with me here, test them out on the new security, so I grabbed one of the boxes to bring.”

Blaine’s eyes widened. _Oh_. 

“Now imagine my surprise when I find no seeds in the box. And I realize that there’s something else inside.”

Shit.

“More curiously, that it’s a _ring_.”

Blaine opened his mouth, and then closed it, grateful that Kurt wasn’t there to see his reaction. “Well there’s a perfectly good explanation for that.”

“Is there?” Kurt asked, voice barely betraying the hint of amusement creeping into it.

“Yes,” Blaine replied, dead serious. “Greece.”

“Greece?”

“Yes, Greece. The ring belonged to a Greek aristocrat who was using it in a string of murders to topple the government, and I was sent to retrieve the ring, but I needed a place to hide it so--”

“Blaine Devon Anderson, that has to be one of the worst lies you’ve ever told me.”

“Well, I tried,” Blaine shrugged before realizing that Kurt couldn’t see him. “You’re the one who ruined the surprise.”

“Wait, wait, wait. Backtrack. So the ring is for...”

Blaine scoffed. “You know what it’s for. Why do you think I wanted to take you out for dinner before you left?”

“I...” Kurt fell silent again. “No. No, you weren’t--you weren’t _actually_ going too--but... No, you couldn’t have been--”

“About to propose?” Blaine smiled, cutting through Kurt’s babbling.

When Kurt’s voice came back it was quieter. “I guess I just don’t understand why? Like, is it because you think this is what I want? Or is it an apology or--”

“Kurt, no,” Blaine sighed. “It’s--okay. I was thinking about our fight. And I know that the reason you push yourself so hard is because you worry. You worry about keeping everyone safe, and you worry about the fact that you’re the youngest Quartermaster in the history of MI6 and that...that there are other things you don’t want to admit to me that you worry about, but I know that they’re there, Kurt.”

There was silence from the other end of the line.

“And when you said that my job has a short life expectancy--”

“Blaine, I didn’t--”

“No, no. You were right. Double-oh agents _don’t_ have a long shelf life. That’s why we come and go, but our titles stay the same. And I don’t know how long I have, or how many more times I can cheat death, but I know that for however long or short that period of time is, I want to spend it with you. _Only_ you.

“To paraphrase a certain Quartermaster, I want you to be mine. I want to have a part of you that you don’t have to share with anyone else. I want something that’s stable and concrete and solid. Genuine romance, not just practiced seduction techniques. And I want to be the person to give all those things to you as well.”

The silence stretched on, before Kurt burst out in a slightly hysterical voice. “That still doesn’t explain why the ring was in my chess square!” 

Blaine laughed. “Well, the plan had been to start out with a lavish dinner, get fairly tipsy, then undoubtably wind up back here because there’d be some random thing that you’d have to check on, at which point I would use your lowered defenses to challenge you to a chess game. 

“A chess game?” Kurt’s voice perked up. “An _actual_ chess game?”

“Yes,” Blaine grinned. They hadn’t played chess since Blaine had been undercover in Lima, despite Kurt’s wheedling. He just didn’t see the point, since he knew what the outcome would be. “I was going to maneuver you into capturing which ever piece I had on the square, then probably say something incredibly cheesy about you capturing my heart, before opening the box and proposing.”

A pause. “That might be one of the most romantic things I’ve ever heard of.”

“Does this hypothetical romantic gesture have an answer?” Blaine wheedled.

“Oh please,” Kurt said, desperately trying to sound aloof, but Blaine could hear the wetness in his voice. “So straight forward and to the point.”

“Just like a double-oh,” Blaine shrugged. “And to be fair, I _had_ been planning to do this in person, not over the phone.”

“Well I fully expect you to do it in person, in exactly the same way. Though I do like this. I’ve been recording the whole thing so that I can listen to it over and over. Maybe blast it on all the speakers in MI6. I’ll make it Smythe’s ringtone.” 

“Devious _and_ sexy. I knew there was a reason I wanted to marry you.”

“Yes, well. You’ll get your answer once you deliver on a full scale proposal. I want flowers, Anderson. Singing. Dancing. Extravagance. The whole nine yards.”

“As you wish, Q,” Blaine grinned, already making mental preparations. “You know, Paris and London aren’t that far apart. It wouldn’t be too tricky to maybe nick an MI6 plane--”

“I’ll leave the details up to you, but if you try to get me on a jet, this engagement will end faster than I can beat Crawford at chess.”

“This engagement? I haven’t received an answer yet,” Blaine laughed, practically hearing Kurt’s fluster over the line. “And if _someone_ had made me his co-field agent on this trip, I could’ve done it all by now.”

“I’ll be back tomorrow, and this barely qualifies as a mission. I’ve been eating egg croissants and working ten hours a day. This is practically vacation.”

“Is it horribly cavemanish of me to admit that I don’t like you being in the field without me?”

“Not _horribly_. More sweetish and worrisome. I’m fine, Blaine. Not all missions have to end in bloodshed and gunfire--”

Kurt broke off suddenly, voice slurring on the edge of his last word. 

Blaine frowned, suddenly alert. “Kur--”

“I’m switching over to the Q Branch speakers,” Kurt said, his voice changing to his “Q” voice and the unmistakable sound of his fingers typing in the background. “This is most likely just me overreacting but... I’ll call you after, okay?”

“Okay,” Blaine said, and the line went dead. He frowned at the empty room which, seconds ago, had seemed so full of Kurt’s presence. Standing, he crossed the room and left, locking the door firmly behind him.

Mike was already talking to Kurt by the time he reached the main desk, glancing over at the screen where Kurt was streaming in schematics of the old Parisian building from France.

“It’s probably nothing,” Kurt said, voice echoing clearly through the room. “I just wanted to make sure that everything would hold up and there was an irregularity right here, do you see it?”

“No,” Mike frowned, leaning closer. “Are you sure it’s not just a glitch in the code?”

“That is what I was thinking...” Blaine could hear the frown in Kurt’s voice. “But that’s the last place there should be a glitch, right? I mean, we’ve used this same procedure a hundred times, I know it frontwards and backwards.”

“It is highly irregular,” Mike agreed, eyes scanning. “Hang on, could you zoom in there?”

The visual on the screen lurched forward, devolving into spidery lines of code.

“I mean, it _seems_ fine,” Mike hedged. 

Kurt sighed. “See, that’s exactly my problem, but--” His voice faltered. “Wait a moment, what is _that_ doing there?” A single line of code zoomed in, all of the numbers suddenly zapping into an irregular order. The entire screen glitched suddenly, the ghost of an image appearing over it. “Okay, what the hell was that?”

“I’m scanning,” Mike frowned, his fingers flying across his keyboard. “What is the--”

_Help! I need somebody!_

Everyone jumped at the sudden music blaring through the speakers.

_Help! Not just anybody! Help!_

“What the bloody hell is that?” Mike yelled, ripping out his ear piece and trying to adjust the volume. 

_You know I need someone! Help!_

“Oh shit. Shit shit shit--this line isn’t secure, neither is this location.”

“Q? What are you talking about--”

“Clear the building!” Kurt’s voice shouted out to others on his end. “002, get everyone out, _now_! That’s an order! R,” he addressed Mike. “Listen to me. I’ve made a horrid mistake. I think this was a trap. 007, are you out of my office?” 

“Yes,” Blaine said, stepping forward. “I’m here.”

“Good. I’m sealing it.”

_When I was younger, so much younger than today, I never needed anybody’s help in anyway._

“What?” Blaine said, and a sound of smashing metal in the background. “Q, what are you doing?”

“I was hacked. I have no idea how, but I was hacked, they’re using my network to trace back to you all. I just had to smash the laptop I was on--how did they get into it? Why can’t I turn off these speakers, there’s so _loud_.”

_But now these days are gone, I’m not so self-assured. And now I find I’ve changed my mind and opened up the doors!_

There was the unmistakable crack of gunfire.

“Q, get out of there, now!” Blaine yelled, coming forward, and gripping the desk as the visuals disappeared. He turned to Mike. “Can’t you get a video feed up?”

“No, it’s free of any feeds, there’s no cams or CCTV, nothing!” Mike snapped, his fingers flying across his keyboard. “That’s why it was chosen, it’s the ideal location!”

“Not anymore!”

“Yes, as I gather, 007!”

_Help me if you can, I’m feeling down!_

“The palm prints have changed,” Kurt said, panicking. “Don’t touch--002, do _not pick up your gun_! The palm prints have been reversed, _don’t_ \--002? 002, respond!”

There was a sudden horrible lack of communication, which refused to be silent due to the blaring background music. 

“I’m on 002’s laptop, and I’m tracing the feed, trying to erase it,” Kurt’s voice came back, no longer calm, but thoroughly shaken. “I can do that at least, I can--” There was more gunfire. Too much. “At least two guards and an agent down,” Kurt reported, his voice starting to shake. 

_And I do appreciate you being ‘round!_

“Q, get out, now!”

“Wait, I’ve got it! I just need to--”

“That’s an order!”

“You don’t have higher clearance than me, 007!” Kurt snapped. “Let me do my job!”

“I’m doing mine, which is to ensure the safety of MI6 executives!” Blaine shot back. 

“I don’t have safety, 007, that’s what I’m trying to tell you!” Kurt yelled. “Why do you think I sealed my office? 002 has yet to report, which means that he’s most likely--”

_Help me get my feet back on the ground!_

“Q?”

“No. No no no no no. Oh god--”

“Q, what’s happening? Keep talking!”

“They put up jammers. I’m disconnected from the network, I can’t _see_ anything that’s going on in the building, Blaine I’m blind--”

“It’ll be okay, can you--”

“I’m on the move. I can’t hear much of anything because of the speakers--”

_Won’t you please, please help me?_

“It’s okay, I’m going to get you out of this,” Blaine said, trying to keep his voice calm. “Okay? It’s just a reversal. All those times you got us all out safely, even when it seemed impossible--”

“007, I’m trapped down in the tunnels, I don’t know the layout of this building well enough, and I now can’t access my main weapon.”

_And now my life has changed in oh so many ways._

“You have another one,” Blaine said quickly. “Do you still have the package I gave you? Because it has--”

“Yes.”

“Okay good, because--”

“No, 007 I...I’m saying _yes_.” 

_My independence seems to vanish in the haze!_

Blaine felt his pulse suddenly very loudly and presently in his throat. “Save it for the chessboard, Q. It can erase and record any scrap of information from any hard drive--”

“You got me a cyber magnetic storage device?”

“Plus if you twist it out of it’s locked position, it will emit a charge that can shatter most surfaces--

“With an ultra high frequency single-digit sonic agitator unit?” Kurt’s voice crept higher in excitement. “Oh 007, you _shouldn’t_ have.”

“Yes, I should. Because they’re currently going to get you out of there,” Blaine said, pulling more sharply into focus, but not letting any of the alert tension leave his body. He could do this. He could get Kurt to safety, the same way Kurt always got him home. “Okay, I need you to tell me what you see so that I can guide you.”

“Tunnels. It’s dark. I turned off my flashlight so that I wouldn’t draw attention to myself and I also lost my glasses when I was running out of the main hanger. I can hear water, but barely. This music’s too loud.”

_But every now and then I feel so insecure._

“Head towards where you hear the water,” Blaine said urgently. If you can hear water over this bloody racket, it must be something big, and close. Head towards it, because that’s your best bet for a way out.”

_And now I find I need you like I’ve never done before!_

The sound of Kurt running filled the bullpen, none of the Q Branch employees working on their previous projects, as they were all scanning and hacking and bargaining with people to try and get their Quartermaster out of Paris. 

_Help me if you can I’m feeling down!_

Kurt’s breath hitched as he lurched to a skidding halt. “I think I hear someone else.”

“Friendlies?” 

_And I do appreciate you being ‘round!_

“I can’t tell! I can’t even _see_ 007, I need--”

And then there was gunfire. 

_Help me get my feet back on the ground!_

“Q, report,” Blaine said, forcing every nerve in his body to keep his voice calm. 

“007, I...I’m hit.”

_Won’t you please, please help me?_

“Tell me what you see, Q!” Blaine snapped, his body going into full blown panic, as the song and the sound of Q Branch behind him trying to establish connections with Paris suddenly faded to a small point in the background and all he could hear was Kurt’s ragged breathing over the com that was slowly getting faster and faster... “Quartermaster, I cannot do my job and _get you home unless you tell me what you see!_ ” 

“It’s dark. I’m crawling. It keeps getting darker, there’s a ringing in my ears and I can’t, I’m sorry, I can’t--”

“Where are you hit? Medical will need to know when they arrive--”

“Medical isn’t coming,” Kurt said, his voice breaking. “No one’s coming, they jammed a mile radius, 007. It was impressive work, actually. That would take massive--”

“Don’t talk about that, focus on--”

“No, you need to know this. This is _important_. For whatever’s coming next, because something’s coming and I don’t think I’m going to be there to stop it--”

“Enough of that talk, Q, now get back to your task--”

“They jammed a mile radius. They must have been waiting here for a while because MI6 has had their eye on this site for the better part of a year, which means they had to have been here before us, which means there has to be a mole. This was all orchestrated for a reason, though I have no idea what, and after this, there’s going to be something more, something bigger coming. You saw the image on the screen, right? it was only there for half a second--”

Kurt cut off suddenly, a muffled clapping noise, and then total silence, not even breathing. If Blaine had to hazard a guess, he’s say that he was covering his mouth so that he wouldn’t breathe so loud. 

Then his voice came back, quieter. “There’s a metal gate. It’s open, and I can hear water on the other side. A lot. But it’s also guarded by three people. 007...I don’t think there’s a way out.”

“Bollocks, there’s always a way out,” Blaine said, though fear and doubt were starting to choke his veins. “I think I’m proof of that.”

“How conceited,” Kurt chuckled. “But even if I had proper eyesight and hadn’t just been shot, I don’t think there’s any way I could take out these three guards, Blaine. _Maybe_ if I was armed, but--”

“You _are_ , remember,” Blaine urged. “ _Use_ it.” 

“I’ll try, I--” Kurt broke off. “One of them heard me.”

“Q, use it.”

“There’s nothing to use it on, the ground below me is too thick for it to do any harm. I’m going to take out my earwig.”

“Don’t you _dare_. Now use it!” 

“I’m sorry, 007, I don’t want you to hear.”

“Q, I swear to god if you take it out, I’m going to--”

“I--”

There was the sound of another gunshot. 

Kurt didn’t get a chance to take out his ear piece, so Blaine heard every second of what happened next. 

There was the sound of heavy footsteps, all dragging across the ground. 

“Is that the welp?”

“We were supposed to take him _in_.” 

“What can you say? I’m a bit trigger-happy. Besides, this was going to happen to him anyway.”

“What should we do with the body?” 

“Well, we already have the perfect place. Nice idea to herd him down here so we wouldn’t have to drag him all the way down.”

Then there came the sound of something large and heavy--Kurt, it was Kurt--being dragged across the ground. And, audible only to those listening in on the ear piece, there was the sound of an unmistakable breath. 

“He’s still alive,” Mike said, moving around the desk. “Anderson, he’s still alive.”

Blaine released a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding, but he didn’t relax. “He’s been shot at least twice.”

“Yes, but the second they realize, they’ll take him in. Whoever wants him wants him for a _reason_. And the second he’s in custody, we’ll be able to find him because of his trackers--”

“But what if...” Blaine’s lips parted as dread filled his entire being as the rushing of water got louder and louder over the com. “What if they don’t check? What if they don’t realize--”

There was the sound of a large grunt, and then a short pause before a large splashing noise filled the room.

“No!” Blaine yelled, taking a step forward. “K--” 

He cut himself off, the name swallowed down forcefully. 

It wasn’t like the movies, where when technology gets wet, it just fizzles before it silently stops working. No, it was an earpiece that Kurt had designed himself. Completely waterproof, and with an adhesive so that it actually _stayed_ in the ear unless you forcibly removed it. 

The sound of rushing water was loud and relentless, but over it was the unmistakable panicked noises of someone drowning, air rushing out of their lungs in large bubbly gasps.

Blaine stood there listening to every second, as the choked wet noises got quieter, and then abruptly stopped. 

Then there was just the rushing of the water to fill the completely silent Q Branch. 

 


	3. Chapter 3

Chapter 3

***

Eight months later...

**London, England**

_“Breaking news about the disappearance of President Jones’ daughter. The first family has now released that she was last seen at a benefit Thursday night. Since then, all trace of her has virtually vanished, including her cellphone and laptop, which are somehow now untraceable._

_“There are also rumors and speculations that a secret service agent has disappeared along with her, but the White House refuses to comment._

_“There are further rumors that this may have to do with the European cyber terrorist, Atlas, but the CIA comments that this is just blatant speculation._

_“Either way, America is hoping that Mercedes Jones is able to return home safely._

_“This is Holly Holiday, for CNN News.”_

Carmen clicked the screen off, turning sternly to the two agents in front of her. “The Americans aren’t happy.”

“Honestly, are they ever?” Sebastian rolled his eyes. “Why should we care if some college student goes missing? The CIA trusts us about as far as they can throw us, so there’s no way we can be assigned to this.”

“We’re not, but the CIA is going overboard. This is a massive oversight on their part so they’re compensating with what they think is efficiency.”

“Typical,” Jesse smirked.

Carmen looked significantly less amused. “As a result, we have to shut down in France.”

“What?” Sebastian snapped. 

“M, that’s absurd,” Jesse said, outraged. “Give the circumstances, we have precedence--”

“They’re claiming its a state of their national security.”

“It’s one twenty year old,” Sebastian rolled his eyes. “Hardly anything to get your knickers in a twist over.” 

“Never underestimate the political havoc a single adolescent can cause,” Carmen cut across, shooting him a look. 

Sebastian and Jesse both glanced at each other because, after all, she was right. They knew from firsthand experience.

“And they’re taking over Project Atlas.”

“They can’t do that!” Sebastian burst out, standing. “This is insane, we’ve been working on it for eight months and finally get a break through. Our servers have been hit just as hard as theirs--”

“Not to mention that we were the first ones hit,” Jesse cut in, before wincing. “Or rather, our Paris branch. 

“It’s literally the definition of a state of national security,” Sebastian crossed his arms. “Plus we had a political leader threatened first as well, but we actually know how to _handle_ that sort of thing.”

“God save the queens--”

“That’s enough you two,” Carmen said sternly. “Sit down, 006, you’re not in primary.”

Gritting his teeth at the reprimand, Sebastian sat. 

Carmen eyed the two of them carefully. “I want you two in charge of guiding this transition along, do you hear me?”

“Yes, ma’am,” the two said in practiced unison. 

“Which includes making sure that 007 stays at HQ when he gets back from Wales.”

They acquiesced again, though neither needed to look at each other to have perfectly matched eye rolls. Trying to control Blaine was like trying to derail a train. Derail a train into the ocean.  In the middle of the Sahara.

“Are we dismissed?” Sebastian asked mockingly, striding out once Carmen waved them off. 

Jesse sighed and followed his fellow agent out of the administrative offices. 

It’d been nearly eight months of hell at MI6, which was truly saying something because the business of espionage tended to be pretty hellish on its own. But it was the type of hell that Jesse personally thrived on, as did most of the other double-oh agents. They were built for extreme situations, thinking on their feet, unreal reflexes. 

That hadn’t prepared him to be at the forefront of a vicious cyber attack, however. 

It had started the day that they’d lost their Quartermaster during what was supposed to be a routine security set-up at a new location. But instead they ended up with eleven dead guards, two dead agents, and a dead quartermaster. They were still recovering the corpses out of the imploded structure.

(The worst part was that Q had made his earpiece a bit too well. With its virtually indestructible casing and battery that could last up to six months of constant use, it was _still on._ If they opened up the channel to connect them, they could still sometimes hear the thick rush of water, wherever Q’s body was.)

Since that day, MI6 had been under attack. According to R, Q had done his best to throw a few safety nets in the way, so that it wasn’t as bad as it could have been. But everyone remembered that day, three weeks after Q had died, when their server fell, and the large outline had glared into the screen, the same one that had flashed momentarily when Q had been trying to secure their servers. 

The outline of a man holding up the world. 

Atlas. 

MI6 had burned (in a few cases, quite literally) all of its servers that day, starting over from scratch. R had been doing his best to rebuild the data protections with the help of some of Q’s old protocols, and from there on out it was a struggle. 

Not to mention the fact that Q’s office had remained sealed, despite everyone’s attempts at breaking into it. 

“I can’t believe we’ve been downgraded to guard duty,” Sebastian grumbled as they headed for Q Branch. 

“I mean, this is hardly the first time,” Jesse shrugged. “It’s just annoying because--”

“We used to be top dogs, not guard dogs?” Sebastian winced at his own words. “God, that sounds terrible.”

“I’d leave the puns to Anderson. If he ever makes them again.”

Sebastian made a grumbling noise as they pushed the doors open to Q Branch. 

It had certainly changed in the last eight months. Gone were the wide clear desks covered in monitors and gadgets, all leading towards the central com table in front of a large screen, and in its place were several smaller desks covered in laptops and wires, accompanied by a good half dozen chalkboards with plans and diagrams and equations written all over them. 

In the thick of it was R, sleeves rolled up and a permanent frown between his eyebrows as he went back and forth between two monitors. He looked up distractedly when Sebastian and Jesse approached him. “Don’t worry, I have your kits ready, just give me a moment to finish writing--”

“No kits required,” Jesse cut him off. “M’s grounding us.”

“The Americans are taking over Project Atlas,” Sebastian sighed.

R’s eyes widened. “They can’t do that, not with recent developments.”

“I know you’ve worked hard, R,” Jesse said, a disappointed half smile on his lips. “And the fact that you were the one to have the breakthrough about the letter-trace servers--”

“That’s not the development I was talking about,” R said, crossing his arms. “America shouldn’t be so focused on Miss Jones--”

“Exactly what I’ve been saying this whole time!” Sebastian threw up his hands.

“--because,” R shot him a look. “There’s something much worse coming. Worse than Atlas, though thankfully the two aren’t working together. Their names share a similar theme though...”

“R, what are you talking about?” Jesse interrupted. 

R bit his lips briefly. “Okay, I may have been taking some credit that isn’t entirely due to me around the letter-trace servers.”

“What? You weren’t the one to figure it out?”

“No, I was,” R shook his head. “But I’m not the reason that Atlas hasn’t been able to penetrate our defenses for nearly two weeks.”

“Explain,” Sebastian frowned.

R sat down in his chair. “Okay, so about every week, Atlas had been broadcasting messages across the world through the internet. Lines of code interrupting traffic, about how he’s in complete control of the internet, and how he holds the entire world wide web in his arms, etc.”

“What a pratt,” Sebastian rolled his eyes.

“Takes one to know one,” Jesse muttered.

“Anyway, these messages were uncrackable. No one could get around them or delete them or anything, so you would basically have to sit around twiddling your thumbs until it was over. Except, a week and a half ago, right in the middle of one of the messages, Atlas was hacked.”

“Wait, who the hell actually managed to hack Atlas?” Sebastian asked. “I thought that it was impossible.”

A grin creeped across R’s face and he paused dramatically. “Not for Eris.”

There was a silence.

R stared between the two of them, before his face fell in disappointment. “Oh come on, don’t tell me you don’t know who Eris is.”

“Not really ringing a bell,” Jesse shook his head. 

“Notorious hacker in the late 80s through mid 90s right when the internet was still kicking off? Wreaked havoc everywhere, but never did much lasting damage? Helped form cyber space as we see it today?”

“No, wait, hang on, I _do_ remember that,” Sebastian said, snapping his fingers in realization. “And no one could ever find a trace of them, right? They suddenly just vanished. There were a billion conspiracies about governments killing them off, or hiring Eris, or that Eris is secretly hiding away in Guantanamo.” 

“Exactly,” R nodded. “It’s been nearly twenty years since anyone’s even heard from Eris, so imagine the uproar that happened when Atlas’ transmission froze and loopy cursive wrote E-R-I-S all over the screen.”

“So Eris is the reason our servers haven’t been hacked?” Jesse asked, trying to piece everything together.

“No,” R shook his head. “That’s the thing. Eris wrote a message stating that Atlas wasn’t even in the top three greatest hackers in the world, and then they opened up the floor, so to speak for anyone to show off their skills. Some hacker in France managed to get on, and he obliterated Atlas’ defenses, shredding through them like they were _nothing_. It was _awesome_.”

“So it’s because of the French hacker that we’ve been safe?” Jesse tried again.

“Yeah. He restored servers around the world, boosting security in at least twenty different government agencies.”

“So that’s how you knew that Atlas was going to be in France,” Jesse nodded. “To go after this hacker, right?”

“And that’s also why the children of world leaders have been threatened in the past week and a half,” Sebastian said. “Atlas is trying to prove his power after this humiliation.”

“But what about Eris?” Jesse frowned. “Does this mean that they’re an ally?”

“I don’t think so,” R shook his head. “Eris never really took sides. I think they just got pissed off that Atlas was trying to claim being the world’s greatest, and put them in their place.”

“Eris is out of reach, but if we could get to that French hacker first--” Sebastian started, before his eyes widened in realization.

Jesse understood at the same time. “That’s why the Americans want us out of France!”

“They’re trying to find him first!” 

R sat back, a smirk tugging on his lips. “So I assume that that means you two will be going off the books?”

“Not yet,” Sebastian shook his head. “We need one more agent to pull this off...” 

***

**Somewhere in Wales**

“Do you know if Cedes is gonna be okay?” 

“I don’t know, Britt. I hope so.”

“I really liked her.”

“I know, me too. But she’s pretty strong, okay? I’m sure she’s going to be fine.”

The conversation a room over echoed quietly into the adjacent study. In the middle of the room, there was an old oak table, probably belonging to a king or queen four generations back. On top of the table was an old stone chessboard. It was made of soft white and blood red stone, the colors contrasting sharply in their neat little boxes.

Blaine sat behind the white side, staring intently at the little red queen and white king on opposite ends of the board from each other, remembering what seemed to be a lifetime past when the two women in the adjacent room had been represented by those little chess pieces. 

A week and a half ago Santana’s phones and computers and even television had starting glitching, sending her messages about her parents, threatening them unless she complied. The same thing had happened to Brittany. They both contacted Blaine when it happened, given that he was one of few secret service agents that they trusted implicitly, given what he’d done for them around the issue of their engagement. He’d personally escorted them to the unofficial safe house in Wales, setting them up and insuring that they would be alright, completely cut off from technology as they were.

Well, except for Blaine. He glanced at his phone, waiting for R’s usual daily update. It had somehow become their unofficial tradition, R keeping Blaine updated on the updates of MI6, since Blaine sometimes was just not there, even when he should have been. In the past week, they’d been keeping him updated on the American situation, and the president’s daughter who’d gone MIA. Blaine had to hand it to her, she had managed to evade both Atlas and the CIA as far as he understood. 

R had also been trying his best to untangle the mess that was the Paris situation, which Blaine was invariably grateful for. 

Reaching forward, Blaine plucked up the little white castle.

_“Maybe I should get a second tattoo,” Kurt mused to the ceiling. It was a Wednesday night and he was unable to sleep._

_“Mmph,” Blaine moaned next to him in reply, groggily coming out of deep slumber._

_Kurt turned to Blaine, smiling as he tapped Blaine’s lips thoughtfully. “A little white rook chess piece, to match your queen one.”_

_Blaine sleepily kissed Kurt’s finger. “Yes dear. Whatever you say.”_

He blinked, setting the piece back down. 

It still felt...raw. Like an open exposed wound that still oozed blood and puss, now matter how many sutures and ointment he put on it. Double-oh agents were expected to patch themselves back up after they were injured and then get back into the field. Blaine had certainly gotten back into the field, but he was in no way healed. 

R _understood_ what it felt like to lose Kurt. Not in the way Blaine did, he hadn’t been in love with him, after all. But Kurt had been important to him, as a boss, as a mentor, despite their age differences. R had respected Kurt, enough that he’d refused his letter signifier when the time came. M pitched a fit, but R said that there was really only one Q.

Plus Blaine suspected that R knew that he’d never be able to call him that.

The entire situation with Kurt was so against everything Blaine had been trained for. He had to mourn the loss of an agent, yes. That was a part of the natural grieving process. Grieve, Mourn, move on. 

But it was _Kurt._

_“I’m going to take out my earwig.”_

_“Don’t you dare. Now use it!”_

_“I’m sorry, 007, I don’t want you to hear.”_

Blaine died. Quite a bit actually. During Kurt’s time as Q, there had been four specific times that Blaine had been officially declared dead. 

The first time Kurt had almost lost it. Blaine had been in the Australian outback to retrieve a mark, and the signal had been terrible, and Kurt had lost all visual. Blaine had had to divest himself of all equipment before curling himself into a barrel that was tossed into the back of a jeep. 

When he made it home to London four days, walking into Q Branch like nothing was amiss, Kurt had grabbed him, dragged him into his office, and shoved him against the door, looking like he was going to scream at him ‘til kingdom come. 

But instead, he’d leaned forward, burrowing his face into Blaine’s neck and making him promise with a shaky voice to _never_ not contact him if he could again.

Blaine had promised. And after not talking to him for a week, Kurt then put a tracker into his shoulder.

The next time had been a messy negotiation in Cairo, and Kurt had apparently left Q Branch abruptly after he was declared dead and activated his tracking chip at home to find him. 

The third was probably the worst. Blaine had been shot three times in a burning building, and his tracker had definitely been fried. His memory of the night was still foggy with smoke and adrenaline and he’d passed out as soon as he’d gotten into Kurt’s flat, his lung tissue deeply scarred, and if Kurt hadn’t have tripped over him coming out of bed to get more tissues, he probably would’ve died of smoke inhalation and bleeding out before too much longer. 

The fourth he called, and he’d been met with a dry, “How’s the afterlife, 007?” 

(Kurt had put three different trackers into him at that point, not wanting to take the risk.)

But the thing was, he always came back. No matter what happened, he always came back home, to the job, to his Quartermaster.

He was good at resurrection. It was his forte.

But it wasn’t Kurt’s. 

_“I don’t know how long I have, or how many more times I can cheat death, but I know that for however long or short that period of time is, I want to spend it with you.”_

He knew Kurt would outlive him. He knew it from the moment they met on that dark Ohio highway. His expiration date couldn’t be too far in the future, and Kurt had had a long life ahead of him. 

But when Kurt became Q, his expiration date had slowly started to inch just a little bit further into the future, gradually but gaining length. He knew that Kurt would fight tooth and nail to lengthen Blaine’s life as long as he possibly could, which Blaine was thankful for, because if there was one thing that he for sure didn’t want to cut short, it was his time with Kurt.

It never once occurred to him that he would ever outlast Kurt in any capacity. 

He had waited. Even though he’d listened to his boyfriend--no, _fiance_ \--get shot twice and then drown, he still waited, so confident that Kurt would somehow pull it off, that he would return home with all the swagger that Blaine had the first time that he’d been declared dead, that he’d say “Why so stern, 007?”

But he never did. 

Blaine stared at the chessboard. There was no black queen. 

His phone pinged with R’s update.

Frowning, he glanced down at his phone, scanning the message. “Who the hell is Eris?”

***

**London, England**

“We’ll be all set to go to France,” Jesse said, plopping their passports down on Sebastian’s desk. 

Sebastian looked up, half surprised, half almost alarmed. “Are you completely forgetting that we still have to find a way around the CIA?”

“Don’t worry,” Jesse shrugged. “I’ve got it under control.”

Sebastian raised an eyebrow. “How exactly?”

Jesse stared at him blankly. “I’m a very good spy, of course.”

“Bollocks. Tell me.”

“It’s not as glamorous as you think, trust me.”

“So now we just have to wait for Blainey boy to come back?” Sebastian groaned, spinning away in his chair. “That could take forever.”

“Well speak of the devil,” Jesse murmured, glancing down at his tablet.

“What?” Sebastian sighed, turning back to look at Jesse.

Jesse smirked, turning his tablet to show him R’s update. “Look who’s back in town.”

***

Blaine moved through the crowded bar full of loud people and thick smoke and dim light. The perfect place to lay low for a few hours. He turned up his collar and headed to sit at the bar, which was surprisingly nice for the seedy vibe. 

“Vodka martini,” he ordered. “Shaken. Dry.”

“Vodka. Neat,” came a familiar voice on his left.

“Vodka tonic. Keep the fruit,” came another on his right. 

His jaw clenched as Sebastian and Jesse slid into the seats on either side of him. “Let me guess. You two are here to bring me back to M.”

“Hardly,” Jesse scoffed. “We’re here to help.”

Blaine raised an eyebrow. “Help?”

“R’s kept you up to date on the France situation, right?” Jesse asked, accepting their drinks. 

“Atlas, Eris, unknown French hacker,” Blaine riddled off. 

Sebastian slid his tablet over. “There’s more. We wanted to look into the hacker in France so R got in touch with some of his old friends in French intelligence, and they managed to link us to a single hacker who popped up seven months ago named E, which is--”

“One of the pseudonyms Eris went by twenty years ago,” Blaine said, leaning forward. “Picture?”

“No one can get a picture of him,” Jesse shrugged. “He was thought to be a sort of recent urban legend. Impossible to trace, his only known staff is his associate, Dani--”

“Who we ran into three years ago in Spain, if you remember,” Sebastian added. 

“And his assistant, Bleu or whatever.” 

“Who’ll be gone in another month, as he tends to burn through assistants like kindling,” Sebastian noted dryly. 

“So E’s either Eris, the French hacker, or someone else entirely...” Blaine frowned, scanning through the file. “How would we even get to France?”

“Well Jesse is somehow getting us in,” Sebastian shrugged.

Blaine’s eyebrows shot up, turning to Jesse. “And how exactly are you going to manage that?”

“Don’t ask, he won’t--”

“I might have...used to date the director of the CIA,” Jesse cringed.

Sebastian rolled his eyes. “Of course you’d tell _Blaine_.” He stopped, Jesse’s words catching up to him. “Wait, you used to date _Berry_?”

“That’s _terrifying_ ,” Blaine added. 

“We were young. In our twenties...”

“You’re _still_ in your twenties.”

Jesse waved a hand. “Details. Anyway I can get us in.”

“And we can see what we can make of Eris, try to ally with this French hacker guy, and take down Atlas,” Sebastian smirked. “All to avenge your dead boyfriend. Oh, right, sorry,” he added at the look Jesse sent him.

Blaine twirled the olive out of his martini. “Okay, why are you two doing this? _Neither_ of you were overly fond of him.”

“He was a good Quartermaster,” Jesse shrugged. “And he didn’t die well.” 

Blaine turned to look at Sebastian. “Okay, to be honest, I’m really asking about you, Sebastian. You _hated_ Kurt.”

“Yes, I did,” Sebastian nodded. “But the one thing I hate more than I hated him, is the fact that he went off and got killed while I still _owe_ him.”

It took a second, but then it clicked into place in Blaine’s mind. “Istanbul?” 

Sebastian’s teeth ground together before he gave a curt nod. “Istanbul.” 

It had been hell, a little over a year back. Sebastian had been in deep cover trying to find an arms dealer hiding out in Istanbul. Blaine had been in New Zealand at the time for a simple escort mission, so he missed most of it, the memory of the time most stark in his mind being that Kurt had barely had time to call or text him or even talk to him over the line because Sebastian’s cover had blown up in his face. It hadn’t been his fault, he’d been betrayed, and then he was on the run, completely cut off from any resources, his only lifeline being that Kurt was still on his side. 

Kurt had gone above and beyond, hacking into three separate government systems to try and clear the way for Sebastian, but everything that could have possibly gone wrong had done so during that mission. 

There had been a moment when they’d lost contact with Sebastian. He’d been trapped in the attic of a building with forty men headed up towards him, armed to the teeth, and seventy men waiting outside in case he tried to escape. 

Kurt had moved the entire operation into his office. 

Everyone had thought the same thing. That Kurt was throwing in the towel. Most of them would have before that point, and there was no feasible way to get Sebastian to safety. And besides, Kurt had never liked him much anyway. 

But three hours later, Kurt had come out of his office, informing everyone that Sebastian was at a safe house before collapsing on his couch for a catnap.

Blaine still had no idea how the hell Kurt had gotten Sebastian out, and Sebastian had never divulged the information to anyone. 

“He was a good Quartermaster,” Sebastian echoed begrudgingly. “When we were all first starting...we used to get on fine regardless if our Q was incompetent or not...but he was one of the better ones.” 

“Over half the double-ohs personally owe him,” Jesse said, taking a drink of his vodka tonic. “So, we’ll honor him the same way we’d honor one of our own.” He leaned across the bar, ordering a White Russian. Kurt’s drink. 

“By hunting down this Atlas bastard and showing him what it really means not to die well,” Sebastian smirked, pushing the drink in front of Blaine.

Blaine stared at the creamy drink, and he could see all too well the way Kurt would smack his lips excitedly and pick it up, had he been there. 

“To Q,” Sebastian said dryly, raising his glass. “And to taking off the white hats when a grey job needs to be done.”

Jesse raised his own in turn. “Because although we can no longer move heaven and earth for him...”

Blaine raised his as well. “We can certainly raise hell.”

They drank to their promise, leaving the White Russian untouched. 

***

**Paris, France**

Dani walked down the street, earbuds in her ears although no music played from them. She acted the part of nonchalant adolescent as she scanned the streets for any signs of activity, or a tail. 

As usual, there were none. 

And so she sharply turned into the appropriate alleyway, pressing against the brick stone until it gave way to reveal a secret doorway, climbing up inside.

She walked through the dark hallway, flashing a grin at the tiny nearly-undetectable camera before swinging her way into the large industrial lift. She paused, waiting for the inevitable creaky noise it made whenever it first started moving, before it brought her all the way up to the penultimate floor, surprisingly quickly. 

She waltzed off, passing the secretary at the well-lit wooden desk. “Morning Bleu!” she said cheerfully.

He made a non-committal noise, too busy texting on his cellphone and gulping down coffee, as usual. 

It was a steep climb up the narrow spiral staircase but then she was surrounded by large monitors and endless black wires. In the middle of the loft was a large steely onyx table where E sat, frown on his face as he fiddled with a little gadget in his hand. 

“You called?” she asked, giving a mock bow.

E glanced up, blinking his eyes owlishly to focus them. “Yes. We might have a situation on our hands.” 

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen a situation that you can’t handle,” Dani smirked. And it was true. They’d only known each other for about six months, but in that time--and in the unstable cyber climate that they currently were immersed in--she’d yet to see him botch even the most harried of situations.

“Well, there’s good news and bad news, I’d say.”

“Then give me the bad news first. I like to save best for last.”

E paused. “The CIA is going to allow three MI6 agents onto French soil. Unofficially.”

Dani frowned. “That’s odd. There had to be some serious back-channeling for that to happen. Or someone owed someone else a huge favor.”

“That’s not all...” E said carefully. “I’ve only got two designations confirmed...but it looks like they’re definitely sending 004 and 006.”

Dani felt a chill down her spine. “Which means that the third is most likely 007.”

“Exactly,” E said quietly. 

Dani folded her arms, considering. “So, on one hand we could play it safe, not botch this operation entirely, try to hide and ignore them.”

“But on the other hand, 004 shot you twice, 006 stabbed me, and I’m pretty sure that 007 was the one to shoot Bleu,” E nodded grimly. “So on the side, we could get some revenge here.”

Dani opened her mouth and then paused, considering. “E, are you sure you want to go down that route? I mean, that could be pretty dangerous--”

“I have my reasons,” E muttered, glancing back down at his work, squinting a bit.

“Well, I’ll stand by you regardless of what you choose,” Dani said firmly. “And regardless of what you choose, please get yourself some glasses. Working on all these screens in the dark can’t be good for your eyes.”

E grumbled something about not liking glasses before bringing the little gadget up closer to his eyes.

Dani stared at the odd young man in front of her. It was true that she’d support him no matter what his decision--he’d proven himself beyond trustworthy and had gotten her out of a particularly sticky situation--but she couldn’t help but wonder what his big secret was that he wasn’t telling her. 

“Wait, what was the good news?” 

“Oh, right.” E swiveled on his table and clicked a few buttons on his laptop. 

The screens surrounding them all filled with the same black and white picture, of a young man with thin glasses perched on the tip of his nose looking back behind him sternly as he stepped out of a bakery.

“Nice bangs,” Dani snorted. “Who is that?”

“That...” E swiveled back around, grin on his face. “Is Atlas.”


	4. Chapter 4

Chapter 4

***

_Sebastian accepted the tumbler of Courvoisier with his usual smirk, taking a generous sip as he scanned the room. “What a bunch of bores. Do I honestly have to stay here?”_

**_“Well, considering that Gunther is due to show up any minute, I’d say not,”_ ** _Q muttered into his ear._

_Sebastian groaned. “Seriously though, what kind of arms dealer willingly has the last name Gunther?”_

**_“Probably 007, if he ever went that route,”_ ** _Q said dryly._ **_“He does enjoy his puns.”_ **

_Sebastian just gave a derisive snort in agreement. He clearly had to be bored out of his mind if he was actually laughing at a joke that came out of Q’s mouth. “Still no visuals on what this bloke looks like?”_

**_“No...”_ ** _He could practically hear the frown in his Quartermaster’s voice._ **_“And that’s a first.”_ **

_“Well we all have faults,” Sebastian commented dryly as he continued to scan the room, eyes passing uninterestedly past the few interested looks he got from women. “You can’t be as flawless as Anderson constantly gushes that you are.”_

_There was a giddy silence on the other line that made him roll his eyes. Gross._

**_“Still, this is highly unusual. Considering that he’s not even top tier and that we have a name, he shouldn’t be this hard to trace. But I’ve hacked every database on this half of the globe, it’s like he’s a ghost or something.”_ **

_Sebastian felt a slight twinge of unease around his shoulders. He’d rather die than admit it, but the fact that Q couldn’t track a mid-level arms dealer set him on edge. Despite his pride, he knew that Q was formidable as far as cyberspace was concerned and he’d seen him take down far too many adversaries to make a jibe about him being to green for the job._

_Suddenly he felt naked with only his Beretta and three knives in his jacket._

**_“006, this room has one too many blind spots,”_ ** _Q murmured into his ear._ **_“I think maybe you should--”_ **

_There was a loud crack and the vase next to Sebastian exploded._

_He dropped to the ground, rolling under one of the buffet tables as he took his gun out of his holster. “What the bloody hell was that?” he hissed as yells and crashes and more gunfire echoed above the table._

**_“That was a blind spot,”_ ** _Kurt said, his voice going cold and clinical, the way it usually did when there was a crisis._ **_“006 do not get out from under that table.”_ **

_“Oh, because these tablecloths make_ **_fine_ ** _cover!” he snapped angrily in response, trying to get a read on what was happening on the other side of the fabric._

**_“Look, if you want to get out of this alive, you have to do exactly as I say.”_ **

_Sebastian gritted his teeth, briefly considering tearing out his earpiece and leaping out with bullets flying just for the hell of it, but his self-preservation instinct was too strong. “Fine,” he said lowly. “But you better prove to be as flawless as Anderson makes you out.”_

***

Sebastian blinked the memory away as he stared over the English Channel. Situation aside, he was glad to be going back to Paris. He’d spent a fairly large chunk of his adolescence there and it’d at least been a good year and a half since he’d last visited. Something about the attitude of the Parisians made him feel more at home in the city of lights than he did in most other places on the continent. 

Blaine came out of the cabin to stand a good twenty feet away, leaning against the rail as he watched the water pass by. 

Sebastian regarded him, taking in his haggard appearance, the way his eyes never really shone anymore besides the occasional glint, usually with anger. The bits of grey by his ears and the fact that he just seemed...older. Far older than his twenty two years.

Agent Blaine Anderson was practically the poster boy for why it was a horrible idea to fall in love in their trade. 

Though, Sebastian supposed he did have to give him credit. Q had been one of their own, and in all honesty, he would’ve put money on Blaine being the one to go first. 

He’d speculated quite a few times what would happen in that scenario. If Q would even stay with MI6. That had been one (of many) problems he’d had with Q--he worked his job well enough, but they never really had any concrete proof that he even had allegiance to England beyond one agent and being on a first name basis with the future queens. 

But he also still had family back home who’d fly out to visit him during holidays (again, because he was afraid to fly, though Sebastian _still_ didn’t see how that was supposedly his fault), and if Blaine was gone, he’d undoubtedly want to live with them. So the question remained--would he move them across the pond or go home? And once home, would he remain a neutral party or do something horrendous like work for the FBI?

As it turned out, Sebastian never had to learn the answers to any of those questions because, against all odds, Q had been the first to go.

And he _was_ pretty pissed about it. 

Because it had been a strike against MI6. 

Because it had taken out not only his Quartermaster, but also 002, who was a friend. 

And because he never got to balance the scales between him and Q, and he was doing a shite job of upholding the promise he made him back in Istanbul. 

***

_“Q, get me the hell out of here,” Sebastian growled as he shucked off his bloody dinner jacket and threw it into a dumpster as he took off down the alley._

**_“Yes yes, just calm down, 00--”_ **

_“Calm down?_ **_Calm down?_ ** _I’m currently out of ammo and down a knife, running down an alleyway--that ends in a dead end. Perfect.”_

**_“Smythe.”_ **

_Sebastian halted his attempt to kick a brick wall. Kurt only ever addressed him as his designation--as he did to anyone in the office he didn’t particularly care for._

**_“First of all, don’t kick that wall. I’ve got eyes on you. I’m in half a dozen networks right now. I got you this far and I’ll get you out, okay?”_ **

_Sebastian set his foot back down, breathing out harshly. “Okay.”_

**_“Okay. Now turn around and kick the wall behind you.”_ **

_“What?”_

**_“Just do it.”_ **

***

The cafe was cramped and steamy with a lot of buzzing chatter. Dani sat down down, dolling out the three drinks. “One coffee, black with biscotti...” She passed the drink to E who pulled his beanie hat further down his head in grumpiness. “One weirdly specific tea latte thingy...” Bleu hummed in thanks, glued to his phone as usual. “And one caramel soy latte pour moi.” She sighed happily, popping off the top. She always insisted they come to this specific cafe for meet-ups because it was too loud for anyone to overhear them, and it was the only coffee shop on this side of the Seine that could pull off decent soy latte foam.

“The Britts have landed,” E said, taking a large gulp of his coffee. Dani winced--that thing had been scalding. “And they’re currently setting up shop in one of 006’s old haunts.”

“They have to be investigating Atlas,” Dani muttered, slurping up foam. “Have there been no other eyewitnesses since last Thursday?” 

“None,” E shook his head. “I’ve been running his picture through databases, but nothing’s come up. He’s obviously been covering his tracks.”

“Well, maybe we could use the agents,” Dani suggested, leaning back in her seat. “They’re obviously after him too.”

“We can’t risk them getting too close though,” E said carefully. “If they find out about the Apple--”

“They won’t,” Dani assured him. “Most just think its hearsay.” 

“Atlas knows better,” E muttered darkly. “This would just be so much easier if I could just tell --”

“I know,” Dani said quietly. They’d had this conversation at least a dozen times. “I know, E.”

A bittersweet smile took over E’s face as he nodded. The only noise that could be heard at the table was the messenger app on Bleu’s phone that went off every few seconds. 

“So we wait?” Dani asked.

“We wait,” E nodded. “It’s the smart thing to do. Observe. Let them settle in before we make a move. And they’ll know that you’re in town if they’re working with the French at all.”

“I know,” Dani grimaced. “Sorry about that.”

“It can’t be helped,” E shrugged. “But in the meantime, we need total radio silence on our end so that they don’t come poking in at us. That means no calls out, no messages in, we do this the old fashioned way. No picture trails.”

“Of course,” Dani nodded.

E sighed, rolling his eyes as he turned to the other occupant at their table. “That means no facebook, Bleu.”

Bleu looked up for the first time since they sat down. “What? That’s not fair!” 

“It’s just for a week.”

“I actually _have_ a social life, unlike you shut-ins.” 

E sent him an unamused look. “Just say that you’re going on vacation. And we’re doing a photo wipe.”

Bleu gave him the nastiest look in his arsenal.

E rubbed his temples. “I need a new secretary.”

***

**_“Alright, everything seems to be okay for now--”_ **

_“I am lying in a bloody grave, Q.”_

**_“Well, not a_ bloody _grave, per se--”_**

_“I swear to god--”_

**_“Look, it worked, didn’t it?”_ **

_Okay fine, yes, it had. Sebastian had almost been shot about seventy times that night already, but he was somehow miraculously without any injury and currently hiding out in a graveyard._

_“If I ever get out of this, I’m going to find Clive-Art Gunther--”_

**_“Art Clinton Gunther.”_ **

_“_ **_Whatever._ ** _I’m going to find him and then I’m going to kill him with my bare hands,” Sebastian hissed through gritted teeth. “Right after I find out what the hell kind of name is Art Gunther.”_

**_“You might say that guns...are his art.”_ **

_Sebastian was silent. “Your boyfriend has rubbed off on you way too much.”_

**_“Why yes he has, 006.”_ **

_Sebastian glared up at the starry night sky. “I hate you so much.”_

**_“I know,”_ ** _Q trilled in a singsong voice._ **_“Just lay low a bit. Try to get rest. I’ll wake you when I find an escape route or if danger is coming, alright?”_ **

_Sebastian’s only response was a long drawn out sigh as he shut his eyes, using years of practiced techniques to drop right off into sleep._

***

Within two days of reaching Paris, the three agents had settled in comfortably in one of Sebastian’s old flats. Their three respective laptops were set up on the coffee table, constantly streaming in updates from R and running whatever programs he was sending to them every hour, doing citywide searches. 

“Okay,” Jesse said, pilling files onto the floor in the living room. “This is all the info we have on the situation, combined with what was given to us by the French and what we already had. Plus everything Rachel was willing to let go of.”

“I still don’t get how you got all of this out of Berry,” Sebastian frowned, leafing through the CIA files. 

Jesse grinned. “With pleasure. Literally.” 

“Gross,” Sebastian said faintly. 

“So Dani’s in town,” Blaine said, pulling out the old MI6 file. “Jesse, didn’t you shoot her that one time?”

“It was barely a flesh wound,” Jesse rolled his eyes. “And whatever, she went for her gun first.”

“True,” Blaine shrugged. “That was a crazy assignment.” 

“The good old days,” Sebastian said wryly. Back then it’d just been the three of them. Sometimes Sebastian would switch and work with Brody and Adam instead, but Jesse and Blaine were far more fun by a long shot. 

They lapsed into a silence as they went through more files.

“Man, Eris was pretty active way back when...” Blaine muttered, flipping through an ancient CIA file. “No one could pinpoint exactly where they came from, and they wreaked havoc _everywhere_.” 

“It never got bad enough, though,” Sebastian frowned. “I mean, cyber terrorism wasn’t what it was back then, and they never got any civilians killed, so governments across the globe were trying to buy out Eris instead. But they never wanted money.”

“Do you think this is the same Eris then?” Jesse asked. “I mean, it has been twenty years without a peep. It could easily be an imitator who’s just as good and trying to use the name as a scare tactic.” 

“Which leads us back to E,” Blaine said, twiddling his pen. “Is E Eris, an imitator, or the French hacker? Or neither? Or all three?”

_“Hey guys...there might be something else,”_ R said in all of their earpieces.

They all sat up straighter. “Go on,” Jesse said. 

_“There was a rumor, back in the late 90s. Well, more of a sort of urban legend, really.”_

“Yes?” Sebastian pressed impatiently. 

_“Well, you know the myth about Eris, right? Goddess of discord, didn’t get invited to a wedding, so she took a golden apple and carved ‘to the most beautiful’ into it and had a few goddesses fight over and then like, the Trojan War happened?”_

“I mean...sure? I guess?” Blaine frowned. “Something like that?”

_“Yeah, well, there was this rumor that Eris had this golden apple of discord that they were going to release onto the web and it would cause total havoc. Come on, you have to remember that, it caused total panic.”_

Sebastian raised an eyebrow. “I’m pretty sure we would have remembered that.”

“Wait, hang on,” Jesse said suddenly. “Are you talking about Y2K? Are you telling us that _Eris_ was behind the Y2K scare?” 

_“Well it freaked a bunch of governments out, so they had to rebrand it someway, and that’s how that happened.”_

“But 2000 came and went and everything was quiet,” Blaine protested.

_“Exactly. That was the last anyone ever heard from Eris until recently. Well, there’s also a rumor that in 2001 there was a followup message about the Apple, but I’ve never been able to find it.”_

“Q probably would’ve known if it were real or not,” Jesse snorted before realization kicked in and he went back to looking at files, studiously avoiding eye contact with Blaine.

_“Yeah, he probably would have. Anyway, if Eris is really back...then the Apple might be too._ ”

“What’s so bad about the Apple?” Blaine frowned. “I mean, besides its namesake.”

_“Well, supposedly it was the key to encrypting any database on the planet, and it could hack into a mold virtually any system it pleased.”_

“Okay, that sounds...bad,” Jesse nodded.

“But you said that you weren’t even sure if it was real or not,” Sebastian said.

_“I guess now is our chance to find out. Also, I’m not the only one who knows about the Apple, you guys. If Atlas thinks that this Eris is legitimate, he’ll be after it as well.”_

“Noted,” Blaine said dryly, and R disconnected. “Great, so now we have an even larger threat to worry about, and whose hands it might fall in. This is, of course, provided that it even _exists_ in the first place.” 

“We need a way to get to E, find out what he knows,” Jesse said, reviewing the file. “This would be so much easier if we could just get a visual on him. Why is he so hard to find?”

Sebastian leaned over and dragged his laptop off the table. “R’s been running face scans for Dani across Paris, so that we can try and get a visual on the situation, but someone’s been wiping footage across the city, left and right, leaving us blind. We haven’t been able to get a visual on her, E, or Bleu. Luckily,” he smirked. “I know how to think outside of the box.”

Blaine narrowed his eyes. “Sebastian, what did you do?”

“I went after the weakest link,” Sebastian shrugged. “Aka the one with too much social media to erase all of it. E did a good job of wiping all of his photos, but he let him keep a few accounts open. Foolish _and_ lazy.”

“You went after the secretary,” Jesse grinned. 

“I went after the secretary,” Sebastian echoed. “Who--despite losing his facebook, twitter, tumblr, and pinterest all in one fell swoop--still managed to keep his dating app on his phone. We’re having dinner tonight.”

“How you always manage to do that, I’ll never know,” Blaine shook his head. 

“Naive male secretaries have always been my speciality,” Sebastian said with relish. “Plus, we know that he’ll do everything in his power to keep this from his boss, since he’s supposed to be laying low with the rest of them. Then, after a significant amount of wining and dining, bam. We’ll have everything we need to know about his boss. Perhaps even a description. Underlings _do so love_ to vent.”

“That...” Jesse stared. “Is diabolical. And _genius_.” 

Sebastian flashed a sharklike grin. “It’s why I’m in the business, boys.”

***

_“I quit,” Sebastian said. “I quit being a spy.”_

**_“One moment, 006.”_ **

_“See? Even my bloody Quartermaster is giving up on me.”_

**_“I’m just moving this into my office, calm down.”_ ** _There was the sound of locks engaging on the other end._

_Sebastian smiled bitterly. “You’re alone now, Q. There’s no need to pretend in front of the minions anymore.” He looked around the cramped dusty attic he was currently trapped in. “Is this the part where you tell me that there’s nothing you can do? Or that you’ve always hated me and you’re about to derive great pleasure from listening to me die?”_

**_“Don’t flatter yourself into thinking that any facet of your being would ever give me pleasure,”_ ** _Q scoffed._

_Sebastian let out a chuckle. “A man’s on his deathbed and you still squeeze in a few barbs.”_

_There was a silence._ **_“You’re wrong, you know. I always intensely disliked you, but I never really outright hated you. I mean yeah, you’re responsible for a few sucky facets of my life right now, but you’re not nearly as bad as Crawford, so that always worked in your favor.”_ **

_Sebastian almost gave up a half smile at that. “Well that’s something to take to the grave. Not-quite-as-hated-by-my-Quartermaster-as-everyone-thought.”_

_There was another silence._ **_“Look, I can get you out of there.”_ **

_“You don’t need to ease me into the next life with false hope--”_

**_“Sebastian.”_ **

_He stopped at that, half shocked into silence._

**_“I can do it. I can. Blaine was right, I_ am _that good.Trust me, there is one trick I haven’t used yet, and if I do, I can get you out. But first I need you to promise me something.”_**

_Sebastian was silent for a long while. “What is it?”_

_Q was silent as well._ **_“Look, MI6 isn’t as safe as everyone seems to think it is. If anything happens to me...I need you to do whatever is best for Blaine.”_ **

_“What’s that supposed to mean?”_

**_“I mean...there needs to be someone else who’ll put him first. And something might happen, I don’t know, I won’t be there to stop it. But if_ anything _happens to me, I need you to make sure that Blaine gets through whatever hell you all will inevitably be put through in my absence.”_**

_Sebastian considered it. “This is just if you die, right?”_

**_“Yes. Otherwise, I’ll be there. Obviously.”_ **

_Sebastian nodded. “Well then, I think the obvious way around this is to just make sure that you don’t die. Provided that you can actually get me out.”_

**_“Oh, I can. So do we have a deal?”_ **

_“Deal,” Sebastian agreed. He’d be a fool not to take it. Besides, it wasn’t like anything was ever going to happen to Q. Anderson would die first, and now Sebastian would be keeping an eye out to save him so he could get out of this ridiculous deal. The only thing he disliked more than his Quartermaster was_ **_owing_ ** _him one. “So,” he said conversationally. “What’s this secret trick that you’re planning on using?”_

**_“Easy. I’m just going to pretend that you’re Blaine.”_ **

***

Sebastian buzzed the bell to Bleu’s apartment ten minutes early, as was his usual tendency. There was a panicked “Uh...come up! I’m still getting ready!” through the static speaker and he smirked as the door unlocked.

Coming early usually meant catching his target in a flustered state of undress, which he would smooth over with charming confidence and, with any luck, he could forgo the usual charade of dinner and a movie and go straight to what he was good at--the sex.

Walking up to the second floor, he opened the sixth door at the end of the hall, sliding inside easily. It was a tiny snug little flat, haphazardly lived in, as was the custom of trendy young folks these days.

“One moment, I’m just pulling on my sweater!” Bleu called from the room over, clearly the bedroom. 

Sebastian started forward, plan in action, but paused. He could use the moment of distraction to scope the place out. Hipsters were always taking photos of things, right? Maybe Bleu had a photo of E lying around. 

He walked over to the mantlepiece, looking at the elegant postcard sized miniature paintings of flowers, rolling his eyes. On the table were a handful of sketches, flowers, trees, etc. Sebastian nearly gagged at the cliched-ness of it. He plucked up one picture, reading the scrawling handwriting that signed the page: Bleu Quagmire. 

Rolling his eyes at the name--Bleu Quagmire? Seriously?--he set the picture down, ready to hunt in the kitchen when footsteps padded into the main room. 

“Sorry about that, I got stuck in the knitting,” Bleu sighed.

Sebastian plastered his trademark seductive smile on his face, turning around nonchalantly. 

His smile froze in place for exactly three seconds before his Beretta was out of his jacket and pointed at Bleu Quagmire. 

Or, more accurately, Kurt Hummel. 

***

_It was a regular boring day at MI6. Life cranked on as usual._

_But one irregular thing happened._

_Q was in the middle of debriefing--flirting--with Anderson when Sebastian came into Q Branch, and neatly dropped five bloodied pieces of equipment on Q’s desk._

_Blaine stared down at the equipment in confusion, but Q just raised an eyebrow at Sebastian._

_“Enemy tech,” Sebastian explained. “I managed to grab it before the whole building went up. I thought it might be useful.”_

_“Thank you, 006. It will,” Q said evenly._

_The two shared a nod. The deal was still on._

***

Kurt’s eyes widened at the sudden appearance of the gun, and he took a step back. “Okay, hang on--”

“You’re dead,” Sebastian said, as it was the only thought running through his mind. “You’re dead, you’re _supposed_ to be _dead_.”

“Wait,” Kurt tried again. “Just--”

Sebastian’s mind gave a jolt and it jumped forward, a thousand thoughts suddenly running through his mind. “You died. I heard the _audio_. You _drowned_. You--” His eyes widened. “Oh my god, it’s been you, hasn’t it? Did you _plan_ this?”

Kurt fell silent, staring at him, eyes flickering to the window briefly. 

Dread filled Sebastian. “How long?”

Those big blue eyes just stared back at him--of course, _Bleu_ and _Quagmire_ , he was still claiming the Q designation from beyond the grave--and it pushed him over the edge.

“ _How long?”_ he yelled, causing Kurt to jump.

“I don’t know,” Kurt said, the words tumbling out. “I’m not sure, it just--”

“I trusted you.” The words slipped out of Sebastian’s mouth before he could stop them, those secret forbidden words that he’d been planning on taking to the grave. “I _actually_ trusted you. I thought for sure if anything went down, no matter _what_ happened, that you’d _never_ do something like this to _Blaine_.” 

Kurt just stared at him, tears starting to fill his eyes.

“How?” Utter bafflement filled Sebastian’s entire being. “How on earth could you do this to him? If you wanted out, why not just _stay dead_? Why come back just to torment him more?”

He stepped forward, pressing his gun to Kurt’s forehead, causing Kurt to flinch, but stay silent. The facts started rolling through his mind in a jumble. Kurt “dying” all those months ago. Atlas striking just then. Kurt becoming Bleu and getting together with old enemy Dani and newcomer E. He didn’t know how everything quite fit together but god, if it was as bad as he thought it was, Kurt must have been planning this for _years_. “Do you have any idea the amount of pain and suffering you’ve caused, to MI6, to _Blaine_ \--”

He was a second away from pulling the trigger--and _God_ did he want to--when an imprint of a memory shot through his head. 

**_“I need you to do whatever is best for Blaine. I need you to make sure that Blaine gets through whatever hell you all will inevitably be put through in my absence.”_ **

His hand shook as he tore the gun away, turning with bile rising in his throat. There was the whoosh of breath being released behind him in relief. 

“You’re still alive. Which means I’m no longer obligated, but now I’ve saved your life so the deal’s _off_. But I’ll do you one better.” He turned back to Kurt--there was no way in hell he could ever think of him as Q again--with a cold smile. “I _will_ do what’s best for Blaine, which means you have twenty-four hours, Kurt. Twenty-four hours to run, to erase your presence of _ever_ being alive--as I know you’re so _good_ at--and to get the _hell_ out of Paris. And if I _ever_ hear a whisper of you again, trust me I will _hunt you down._ ” 

Kurt stared at him with wide eyes as he turned to leave. He paused at the doorframe, looking back. 

“Oh, and if you even _think_ of trying to come for Blaine, I’ll tell him everything, and _he’ll_ be the one to pull the trigger.”

He slammed the door shut behind him, mentally mapping out a way to get Blaine the hell away from Paris as soon as possible. 

***

On the other side of the door, Kurt Hummel stared in shock, not breathing. 

“Who...the _hell_...was _that_?” he whispered, before the chemical confusion in his body overloaded and he passed out in the middle of his living room. 

 


	5. Chapter 5

Chapter 5

***

_It was dark and heavy and wet and he couldn’t breathe. He thrashed his arms back and forth, but it was useless. They were too sluggish, too heavy, too--_

_He felt something in his pocket. It took his brain a few seconds to realize what it was--_

Kurt sat up, breaths heaving into his lungs as he looked around wildly. 

He was sitting on the floor of his living room, wearing a nice knit sweater that he usually only wore on special occasions--

And then it caught up to him. E blocking their accounts. He left his dating app open as bait, hoping that one of the agents would snag it. A “Seth Steiner” had asked for a date, which he’d assumed to be Sebastian Smythe, whom he’d heard about from E, and how 006 had once knifed him at a party. 

He’d thought, as the one member of his little trio unassociated with Smythe in any way, that it would be a good opportunity to study him, see if he let anything slip. 

He hadn’t been expecting a Beretta to the face.

A sudden pain shot through his head like it always did when information would creep up that he _shouldn’t_ know. Why on earth did he know what a Beretta looked like?

But Smythe had freaked. Yelled at him about things he had _no_ idea about. 

Standing perhaps a bit too quickly--if the sudden rush of blood to the head was anything to go by--he looked around the room wildly, brain in hyperdrive. 

Twenty-four hours. That was how long Smythe said that he’d give him to get out of Paris. He didn’t know why he had to leave, but from the prior conversation, he had the feeling that Smythe wouldn’t hesitate to put a bullet in his head if he didn’t comply. 

Turning, he strode back into his bedroom, grabbing his jacket to head to Elliot’s because he had a few things he needed to figure out first.

His phone buzzed and he sighed, picking it up. “Look Mercedes, this _really_ isn’t a good time.”

***

_His teeth hurt from clamping down on the little metal breathing device, but it was a small sacrifice to pay considering that it was the only thing keeping him alive._

_Not that it would do him much good, considering that he was probably going to die under the thousands of gallons of water battering him back and forth._

_And it was dark. So..._ **_so_ ** _dark._

_He was tired, so why couldn’t he just--_

***

“How was your date?” Jesse smirked when Sebastian walked into the apartment. “Faster than I thought, for sure.”

“It didn’t happen,” Sebastian said, distracted, as he headed over to the wet bar. “The apartment was completely scrubbed out. I think E found out about the date and flipped. They’re mobilizing, I think. We should go, get out of Paris, maybe try Madrid--”

“Whoa, hang on,” Blaine cut across, standing. “We _just_ got to Paris and have our first lead, and now you want to just up and leave?”

“Did you not hear a word I just said?” Sebastian snapped. 

“I didn’t hear words, I heard _thoughts_ ,” Blaine countered. “That you _think_ E found out about the date, that you _think_ they’re mobilizing.”

“Not now, Anderson,” Sebastian warned, pouring himself a glass of vodka. “You have no _idea_ what we’re up against here--”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Jesse interjected, standing as well. “Sebastian, what happened?”

“Nothing,” Sebastian insisted. “Look, we just need to get out of Paris. “Like, right now.”

“Is something coming?” Jesse asked calmly. “Because if so, we can deal with it.”

Sebastian hesitated and to Jesse, he looked almost reluctant. “Not...not like this. Can you just take my word for it?”

“No,” Blaine said evenly.

“Blaine--”

“No, I’m not going to let this go.”

“And why not?”

“Because this is where he _died_ , Sebastian.”

Sebastian fell silent, a sallow look taking over his face. He bitterly took another drink. 

“And I have a feeling that his killer is still in the city.” 

Sebastian looked away. Blaine noticed. 

“Blaine,” Jesse said. “Look, we both know how you felt about Q, but that comes later. Right now, we have to focus on Atlas, on E, on the mission--”

“I proposed.”

Sebastian looked up sharply and Jesse blinked. “ _What_?” 

“I’d been planing on making it big. All pomp and circumstance. He’d never admit it out loud but...he loved all the big showy romantic gestures. But he accidentally took the ring with him to France and found it before I could ask. He called me and I told him and then everything happened and in the middle of running he said _yes_ and--” 

He broke off, turning to look out the window. 

Sebastian grabbed the whole bottle of vodka, taking a long drink straight from it.

“Blaine...” Jesse started, at a loss for words.

“It’s fine,” Blaine shook his head. “Or rather, it’s not, really. Which is why I’m going to find every single person behind that attack and make them suffer. And before we leave Paris, I’m going to make sure that I’ve covered all my tracks first.”

Jesse was quiet for a short while. “Okay.”

Sebastian just kept drinking. 

***

_His teeth felt oddly loose somehow, and he felt the metal slip from them. He was so heavy and tired and cold and he just wanted to sleep..._

_A reason to keep living kept flitting in and out of his brain, but it became fainter and fainter every time. What was the name of it? It was a name. No, a number? No, that couldn’t be it, could it?_

_It was a..._

_...a..._

_...a..._

_There was a bright light below him. Long and sort of rectangular, like a...a..._

_“Castle?” The word was silent as it came out of him, in a rush of bubbles, along with his last breath as he fell down into the light._

***

Kurt wanted to run through the warehouse, but he made sure to keep a measured yet brisk pace so that the cameras would pick up his identity and he’d actually be let up the lift. He climbed inside, gripping the wooden ledge, and breathing heavily as he went up to the penultimate floor. 

The reception area was empty--naturally, as he wasn’t there to man it--and went straight up the spiral staircase into the loft. 

Elliot and Dani were already there, leaning over the main desk discussing something. Both straightened when Kurt walked in.

“Bleu,” Elliot smiled. “We were just going to talk with you about--”

“006,” Kurt cut across him. 

“What?” 

“What did he look like? He is the one who stabbed you, right?”

“Yeah,” Elliot frowned. “I mean, he’s tall, lanky, white, brown hair, looks sorta like a meerkat?”

Kurt nodded. “So...he might have paid me a visit last night.”

“What?” Dani stepped forward. “What happened?”

“Well, he asked me out over that app you recommended--”

“You were supposed to delete that!” Elliot interrupted. “Along with everything else, if they’d traced it--”

“Oh please,” Kurt rolled his eyes. “It’s _me_ , there’s no way they’d be able to hack me--”

“I wouldn’t be too sure,” Elliot shot back. “You’ve obviously been out of practice what with your...condition--”

He cut off at Kurt’s sharp glare.

“Look, what did 006 _say_?” Dani asked sternly. “Were you able to get your hands on any of his electronics?”

“No,” Kurt shook his head. “That’s the thing--I thought it would be safe to meet up with him because I’m the only one he hasn’t been in contact with but...I was wrong about that.”

“What?” Elliot said sharply.

Kurt bit his lip. “The second he saw me he started yelling at me, about something I’d done about MI6, and he knew my _name_ ,” Kurt rambled, the details flitting through his mind. “And something about...” The name whispered through Kurt’s mind. “...Blaine?”

A sudden, too-familiar, hot chill went across his shoulders and up to his cheeks. He pointedly ignored it. 

Elliot and Dani exchanged a glance, both looking back at Kurt with trepidation. 

Kurt eyed the two warily. “What?”

“There’s something we haven’t told you,” Dani said, pushing her hair behind her ear. 

“Which is?”

“We were able to identify which gun shot you during your...accident,” Elliot grimaced. 

“A Walther PPK 9mm Short,” Dani supplied. “A gun that I’ve only ever known three men to use.”

“So, we can narrow down whoever shot me to three different people?” Kurt asked. “That’s...good, right? Makes things easier?”

“Two of those three men are already dead,” Dani continued. “And the only person remaining is Blaine Anderson.” 

“Blaine Anderson?” Kurt repeated, the name feeling familiar on his tongue for some reason. “Who’s Blaine Anderson?”

“Agent 007 of MI6,” Dani said quietly. 

Kurt felt his stomach drop somewhere below his knees. “I was shot by a _double-oh_ agent? When exactly were you guys going to tell me?” 

“We thought it might have just been an isolated incident,” Elliot sighed. “But if 006 is going off on you, then this whole situation might be way worse. We should do recon.” 

“We can’t take him with us though,” Dani muttered. “He‘d just be in danger.”

“I’ll be fine--”

“No, she’s right,” Elliot shook his head. “You should stay here. We’ll go see what the three agents are up to.”

“Elliot--”

“ _Kurt_.”

The use of his real name gave him pause.

Elliot gave him a smile. “Stay safe.” 

***

_Kurt frowned, turning another confusing little corner. He’d never been in Paris before and it was far more dizzying than he’d counted on, especially since his feet wanted to go in another direction than he knew he was supposed to go._

_He passed the same busker for the fourth time, and then he knew that he was lost. He sighed, glancing down at his phone, trying to figure out the GPS._

**_“No one knows what it’s like to be the bad man...”_ **

_Kurt rolled his eyes as he kept trying to enlarge his location._

**_“To be the sad man...behind blue eyes.”_ **

_Kurt glanced up and the busker was staring right at him. “American?”_

_The guy stopped singing, but kept playing on his guitar. “How’d you know?”_

_“You don’t really have the yaourt sound that most French guys have when they try to sing American rock.”_

_He grinned. “Are you lost, Blue Eyes?”_

_Kurt shrugged. “Might be. Trying to find a job interview.”_

_“Well it looks like you found it,” the guy flipped his guitar over onto his back. “Call me E. I’ve been tracking the work you’ve been doing. Impressive, considering you’ve been in a tiny little nothing of a town in the countryside.”_

_Kurt crossed his arms. “We make due with what we have.”_

_E grinned. “Where are you from? Back in the homeland?”_

_“Ohio,” Kurt said. “At least, I think so. Things are fuzzy, you know?”_

_“Understandable,” E nodded. “So, I think your work is impressive, but you’re going to have to actually wow me if you want the job.”_

_Kurt raised an eyebrow. “Elliott Nathan Gilbert, twenty-five years old, originally born in Boston, but lived in New Jersey most of your life. At nineteen you ran away to New York City and started your hacking career there. Since then, you’ve switched aliases, hopping from place to place and shedding past attachments. Congratulations, you’re hired.”_

_E stared at him. “What?”_

_Kurt shrugged. “Well, I need answers, and you were the only one to track me down. So congrats, you’re hired.”_

***

Kurt waited for Elliot and Dani to leave before taking control of the central console, flying through files. He needed answers sooner, rather than later, seeing as he was on a time limit. 

It was hardly too long before he was sliding into a back door in MI6’s mainframe. He’d always secretly liked MI6’s network. Whoever had set it up had clearly known what they were doing, even though the style that it was run at the moment was very different from its skeletal design. Which was probably why Atlas had been able to slice through it so easily. 

He started downloading dozens of redacted files on double-oh agents, simultaneously trying to scour his memory for anything useful. 

It was hard. There were large chunks missing. He remembered some things clearly, like his father and glee club and chess club and the sharp pain of getting an octopus inked into his skin. 

And he remembered darkness and water and wanting to die, and then washing up on a bank and a long blur of surgery and having physical therapy and two scars to add to a collection. He remembered that the only things that he’d had besides waterlogged and tattered clothes was a flash drive in the bolt in his shoulder--that he had no way of accessing because he’d obviously changed his password and had no hope of guessing it, and the new safeguards that he’d presumedly put on it himself were way too hard for him to crack--and a ring on his left fourth finger. 

But the middle--a good almost-three years of his life--was a long smear, interrupted only with vague impressions and memories of code and that was it, that was all he remembered. 

Well, at least that was all that he told Dani and Elliot about. 

There was one more thing, something that only happened at night, when he was sleeping, and he’d dream of someone else. A man with a bright smile who he could never quite look at clearly, who was always on the brink of becoming too stubbly, whose chin Kurt would tip back as he’d swipe a cutthroat razor back and forth through lather, shaving him clean. Someone with strong hands and dry lips and--

Kurt’s fingers stopped typing as he found himself blushing up to his roots. They were probably just fantasies he’d had about a coworker or a sweet guy next door or hell, even a new glee club member back from when he was in high school that he couldn’t remember. 

It didn’t help that he could find virtually no trace of himself on the internet after a certain point during his junior year of high school. He’d virtually vanished. 

But now he at least had another lead. 

He impatiently nabbed at the double-oh files, perhaps a bit more recklessly than he usually would, and tore through them, bringing up 007’s file.

When the file pinged, he glanced up, eyes widening. 

He was met with a large picture of a young man, dark curly hair and bright hazel eyes. He looked fairly belligerent with a split lip. 

And for some reason, the name that popped into Kurt’s head was _Devon_. 

Kurt shook his head lightly, refocusing in on the photo. 

Blaine Anderson. 007. Twenty-two years old. At eighteen, he was the youngest double-oh ever appointed. Born in Glasgow, only known relative was Cooper Anderson, was trained in fencing and exclusively used Walthers on his missions.

Kurt swallowed as he brought up more information, reading with fervor. 

Anderson had gone off the grid at one point, sometime around when Kurt’s memories started to get blurry, but everything in the file was redacted, except for one word. 

Ohio. 

Breathing slightly quicker, Kurt went through the missions since then. Most of them were heavily redacted, but he was able to glean that Blaine Anderson was very good at what he did. He regularly received missions, completed them to the fullest extent that he could--though they usually seemed to go not-quite-so according to plan.  

There was another period of disappearance. About eight months ago, for a month. Kurt frowned, leaning forward to find information about it. 

There had been a mission, one in Paris. Cyber security. Kurt leaned forward, glancing at the date, feeling his blood run cold. 

It was the same date and location as the last log of his inaccessible flash drive. 

Kurt tried to bring the details of the event up as best as he could. 

A cyber attack. A double-oh agent was on the scene. Numerous casualties, including the Quartermaster of MI6. 

The pieces started to click together in Kurt’s brain. Blaine Anderson had gone to Ohio a few years back, around the time when things started getting blurry for him. He must have been found out by MI6, maybe he’d hacked into their mainframe one too many times, and they’d sent Anderson out after him. He’d been a mark.

But he would’ve seen it coming. He must have gone on the run, that’s the only option open to him. Running for years, hiding in the underground, it was harder to hit a moving target. 

Something must have happened. Something to make him angry. 

_“Do you have any idea the amount of pain and suffering you’ve caused, to MI6, to_ **_Blaine_ ** _\--”_

Smythe’s words echoed through his head as he leaned back against his chair in disbelief. 

“I think...” he whispered. “I think I killed MI6’s Quartermaster.”

***

_“We’ve been hacked.”_

“What?” Sebastian said, R’s voice in their ears drawing all their attention sharply to their laptops on the coffee table. 

“By Atlas?” Jesse leaned forward. 

_“No, but the style is familiar. It’s the same as the French hacker’s.”_

“I thought they were a friendly?” Blaine frowned. 

_“Maybe not. They tore through all of our double-oh files and sort of lingered on one in particular.”_

“Let me guess...” Sebastian groaned, rubbing his face.

_“Yeah, Blaine’s.”_

“So I might have an admirer,” Blaine shrugged. “So what?”

_“Well it might be nothing, but you three should keep your eyes open.”_

“Will do, R,” Jesse sighed before signing off. 

“Blaine, go get food,” Sebastian said suddenly from the couch.

“What?” Blaine raised his eyebrows. 

“I’m hungry, go get some food.”

Blaine kept staring at him. 

Sebastian rolled his eyes. “Please?”

Blaine hesitated, but nodded, grabbing his coat. “Fine, but we’re talking about this when I get back.”

Sebastian just waved him off.

***

**_He found himself pressed against a wall, breathing heavily as a lightly stubbled jaw dragged down the side of his neck, hot breath fanning out over his collarbones._ **

**_Kurt grinned, diving his hands into dark hair, his body straining--_ **

_Kurt rolled off his bed, tangled up in sheets and sweating as he tried to stop his heart from racing so fast, pressing his face against the cool hardwood floor._

***

“I killed a Quartermaster, I killed a Quartermaster, I _killed_ a _Quartermaster_ ,” Kurt muttered over and over, hands shaking. 

Double-ohs were loyal. They were only loyal to their own governments, but they were loyal. If Kurt had killed one of the executive heads of MI6, then every double-oh agent would be out for his blood. No wonder 007 had shot him. 

006 had given him twenty-four hours. His time was almost up. He had to get the hell away, if _he_ was any indication of what was to come. 

But he didn’t just want to up and leave Elliot and Dani. They’d been the closest thing he’d had to a home since he’d washed up on that river bank eight months ago.

But if he stayed, he’d be putting _them_ in danger. And double-ohs tended to be the sort of “revenge is a dish best served cold” types. He had no doubt that they wouldn’t hesitate to slaughter Elliot and Dani in their wake. 

No, he had to go. Probably immediately, he couldn’t afford to go home first--

Except...except that in an effort to go out on a date with Sebastian Smythe, he’d taken off his ring. And it was still at home. 

He had no idea where he’d gotten it, but he knew that he’d rather leave behind his laptop than that ring.

And so he headed home to pack.

_***_

Blaine couldn’t help the feeling of unease that was settling into his stomach as he returned to Sebastian’s flat with dinner. He couldn’t shake the nagging feeling that Sebastian was hiding something from him, something big. 

He climbed the stairs up to the flat, opening the door silently and heading towards the kitchen, when the sounds of hushed conversation turned his attention towards the bedroom. He crept across the carpet, pressing an ear to the door. 

“--understand why you can’t just tell me, Sebastian.” 

“Please, just trust me on this one. We need to get Blaine out of Paris as soon as possible.” 

“How can I trust you if you won’t give me _anything_?”

There was a sigh. “Okay, let me put it this way. Bleu is...Blaine can _not_ find out who Bleu really is. It would destroy this entire operation, because Blaine would hunt him down and demand answers for everything that happened here in Paris eight months ago, and the answers would _break_ him.”

Blaine backed away from the door, eyes wide. 

It was Bleu. Bleu was the one to kill Kurt. 

He grabbed his gun and left without a sound.

***

R walked into Q Branch, balancing a large stack of files to put on his desk. He was about to plop them down when he noticed what, or rather who, was sitting on it.

“003!” he said, accidentally dropping all of the files.

She raised an eyebrow, watching him drop down to collect them. “Now now, R. Is that any way to greet a lady?”

“Apologies, it’s been a long day,” he said, rushing through his words as he started stacking the files next to her on his desk. 

“You’ve been working yourself too hard, R. Come here.” She took his hands and sat him back in his chair. “See? Much better. Now, why don’t you plan to take the night off?”

“I can’t,” he sighed. “St. James, Smythe, and Anderson are still in Paris, and I have to be vigilant in case--”

“Oh, always with those three,” Tina sighed, shaking out her hair. “What about me, R? Who gets to take care of me?”

R frowned. “Is there anything wrong with your kit?”

“No,” she trilled. “Not particularly.”

“Well then what do you want?”

“You to take me out to dinner tonight, of course. Anywhere I can wear heals.” 

R stared at her, mouth open as his brain tried to catch up. “I--um...”

She slid off the desk, bending at the waist so that they were at eye level. “How about it, Mike? Some just desserts?”

“Where is all this coming from?”

“Oh come on,” she rolled her eyes, taking a hold of his tie. “We’ve been flirting for months, are you honestly that surprised?”

“Yes,” he said emphatically. “All of the double-oh agents flirt, but they usually don’t--”

He was interrupted by the beeping on his screen. 007 was calling.

Tina sighed, depositing herself in the rolling chair next to his. “Take it if you must.”

R glanced at her sideways before accepting the call. “007, what can I help you with?”

_“You still have that tracker in Smythe, right?”_

“Of course. Why, is he missing?”

_“No, I just need you to tell me the address he went to last night.”_

R frowned, but looked it up, relaying it to 007 in clear precise wording. 

_“Thanks R. Signing off.”_

“Yes, 007,” R nodded, turning off the com. He looked back up at Tina. “See? They still need me, I can’t leave.” He tried to make the apology in his voice as plain as possible. 

Tina eyed him for a moment. “Well I guess we’re getting takeout then.”

***

Kurt raced up to his apartment, pushing open the door bearing 206 as he headed straight for the bedroom. He pulled the tiny little box out of his bedside table and slid the ring back on his fourth finger. It was a pretty thing. White gold, as far as he could tell, though it looked like it employed another metal alloy. Either end had a diamond edge and there was a faint engraving on the inside that he couldn’t quite make out. It was the only clue to some semblance of a life in the missing years that he couldn’t quite remember. 

He grabbed a change of clothes before heading out to the kitchen. He looked reluctantly at some of the items strewn about that he wished that he could take, but ultimately couldn’t. He grabbed an entire box of protein bars from the cupboard and was looking for a water bottle when he heard the door open with a soft click.

He froze, ducking down behind the counter, looking around for his knife block. 

Of course today would be the day that they were all in the dishwasher. 

Taking a deep breath, he peered around the corner.

He was greeted with the visual of 007 standing in his living room.

“I know you’re here,” Anderson said, his voice calm and quiet. It was extremely eerie. “So you can do us both a favor and come out. Wouldn’t want things to get messy, would we?”

Kurt crouched down lower, trying to figure out an escape route. The main window and front door were both on either side of Anderson, so they were out, as was the window in Kurt’s bedroom. 

There was a small kitchen window above the sink, but it was only two feet wide and a foot high. Not really something that he could just jump out of in a hurry. 

Plus there was a story between his flat and the ground. 

“Let me give you two options. One--you try to run and I find you, make you pay for your crimes, and then take out your little friends as well. Two--you come out...and well, nothing really changes actually. This all really just depends on if you’re foolish enough to try and escape.”

Pure, unadulterated dread filled Kurt. He was going to die.

“I’ll give you the count of three.” 

But he didn’t have to be the only one.

“One--”

“Don’t hurt them,” Kurt whispered before his body realized what it was doing.

There was a pause from the other room. “What was that?”

“Please, don’t hurt my friends, they had nothing to do with this.” The words just kept rushing out of Kurt as he slowly stood. “I’m coming out, I’m unarmed just...just please don’t.”

He took a deep breath and walked around the corner.

The barrel of a Walther PPK 9mm Short was aimed at him from the other side of the room. 

All of the air left Kurt’s lungs at once as he looked from the gun to the agent who was pointing it at him.  

Blaine Anderson was staring at him, but not with the fervent mocking hatred that he’d imagined. Instead it was pure and utter shock. 

Kurt’s breaths started coming out ragged, his mind firing off in a thousand directions. “Look, please, don’t hurt them, they didn’t have anything to do with this. It’s me that you want.”

Anderson was silent, still staring at him, disbelief across his face. He almost looked like he was about to cry. 

“I’m sorry,” Kurt said, having no idea what he was apologizing for. “Please, I’m sorry for whatever I did, I’m sorry about Paris, and the accident.”

Anderson lowered his arm, but before Kurt could so much as sigh in relief, he took a step forward and Kurt’s body seized up in panic. 

“Look, I still don’t know all of what happened,” Kurt said, trying to be placating but coming across more like pleading. “But it must have hurt you badly, right? And I’m sorry for that--” Anderson took another step forward. “ _Please_ , you have to believe me.”

Anderson just kept walking forward, staring at Kurt.

Kurt looked around wildly, trying to see if any of his exits would work, but there was no way he could take on a double-oh agent, especially unarmed. “Tell me how to make this right. I’ll do _anything_ , just tell me what to do, please.”

Anderson reached out his left hand and Kurt hissed, panicking. “I’ll leave the country! I’ll disappear, you’ll never hear from me again, I promise just...just tell me! Give me something, please! Say _something_!” 

Anderson’s hand touched Kurt’s cheek and Kurt tensed, waiting for it to move down to his neck or something, but the touch was warm and his body was humming with adrenaline. And everything grew very still. 

“It’s you,” Anderson whispered, still staring at him. “It’s _you_.” 

Kurt’s mind exploded with noise, trying to figure out why the voice was so familiar and what was going to happen next and why Anderson’s hand was so warm and why he was wanting to call him _Blaine_ instead. So he tuned it all out and tried to focus on one thing. 

Like the dot of red light that had suddenly appeared on the side of Blaine’s temple.

He reacted without thinking, yelling “Blaine!” as he shoved him forward, just as the glassof his living room window shattered and a heavy force hit his left arm. 

They both went crashing to the ground. 

“Kurt!” 

The name was loud and right in his ear and Kurt snapped to, looking around. He was on the ground, his shoulder had been clipped by the bullet, Blaine was on the ground too, there was blood but not a whole lot. 

“Kurt, are you okay?” 

“I’m fine,” he said, mind reeling. Why had he just saved Blaine? 

“We need to move,” Blaine said urgently, pulling him up by his uninjured arm and moving towards the door. “Come on.” 

Kurt followed wordlessly as they raced down the stairs in the hallway and out the door into the mild Parisian night. Blaine’s hand was clasping his tightly as he pulled him down a tight alleyway, motioning for him to be quiet as they stood, chests pressed together as they listened.

Well, Blaine listened, Kurt stood there wondering what the hell had just happened. 

After about a minute, there were the sounds of footsteps approaching.

“We need to kiss,” Blaine said, turning back to Kurt. 

“What?”

“The raunchier the better,” Blaine whispered. “Step in front of me, cover as much of my hair with your hands as possible.”

Kurt looked at him like he was crazy. “What, so that my back is to them when they shoot so I’ll get hit first?”

Blaine gave him a look. “No, so that I’m facing them so I can aim, Kurt. You should know the drill.”

Kurt opened his mouth to argue, but that’s when Blaine leaned forward and kissed him. Deeply. Kind of wetly too. 

Kurt blushed to his roots as he reached up, cradling Blaine’s head in his right hand--as he was sort of unable to lift the other--and tilting his head slightly so that their lips slotted together a bit better. Blaine’s arm snaked around his waist and he was almost too distracted to hear the body falling behind him. 

Blaine broke their kiss, his eyes blazing. “Let’s go.”

***

“Wait...you’re telling me that Bleu...is _Q_.” 

“Yes,” Sebastian sighed. “Unfortunately.”

Jesse stared. “So has he been in on it this whole time?”

“That’s what I figure. So do you need to agree now that we need to get Blaine the _hell out_ of Paris yesterday?”

“Okay, fine,” Jesse nodded. “We do, but we also need to figure this out. And we’re going to have to tell him eventually.”

“You’re kidding, right?” Sebastian snorted. “If he found out, it would break his heart. We just need to be calm...logical...” He said, pacing before he stopped, frowning. “Wait, shouldn’t he have come back by now?”

“Yeah...” Jesse said, walking out of the bedroom. There was a bag of takeout on the counter. “It looks like he did.”

Sebastian went cold as he turned on his com. “R, report.” 

There was a giggle on the other line. _“003 here.”_

Sebastian ground his teeth. “Cohen-Chang, put R on.”

_“No fair, why do you boys get him all to yourselves?”_

“Blaine might be in trouble, 003,” Jesse chimed in, turning on his com. “We need to find out where he went.”

_“That’s easy. R gave him the address of wherever you went last night, 006.”_

“What?” Sebastian yelled. 

There was a knock on the door. 

“That’s probably him,” Jesse said, moving towards the door to open it. 

It wasn’t Blaine. It was a blond man in a suit. “MI6, right?”

Sebastian pulled a gun. “Who are you?”

The man stared at the gun, disinterested as he turned back to Jesse. “Sam Evans, White House secret service. I need your help.”

***

They ended up in a small little house squashed between two apartment buildings on the south side of town. 

Kurt was silent as Blaine wrapped his arm in gauze.

Nothing made sense. Why he’d saved Blaine. Why Blaine was currently helping him. Unless it was a guilt thing? Trying to repay the favor? 

_“It’s you. It’s_ **_you_ ** _.”_

Kurt shook his head, looking around. “Where are we?”

“MI6 safe house,” Blaine muttered, cutting the gauze. “We should be fine here for the night.”

“Ah,” Kurt said in response, looking away.

Blaine sighed. “Okay, what is it?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well you’re obviously mad about something, so why not just come out with it?” Blaine said, crossing his arms. 

Kurt felt his face get hot. “You can’t just...kiss people and then act like it never happened!”

A laugh erupted out of Blaine. “What? Kurt, don’t be ridiculous.” 

“I guess it doesn’t matter with you lot,” Kurt shot back, his anger rising from Blaine’s laugh. He knew it was a silly thing to get mad over, but he just couldn’t help it. It was _personal_. “You all just kiss and shag whoever you want without any regard for who you’re touching, but it’s not like that for everyone else, you know!” 

“Oh please,” Blaine shot back, his voice clipped. “It’s not like you’ve never been kissed before!”

“I haven’t!” Kurt snapped, his face enflamed. 

Blaine opened his mouth to say something back before he froze, his eyes widening. “ _What_?” 

Kurt avoided his eyes. “Look, it’s not _that_ uncommon, alright? I’ve just never--”

“Yes, you have been kissed,” Blaine cut across, looking thoroughly bewildered and almost insulted. “Thoroughly, I might add. Multiple times. Over literally every inch of your body.”

Kurt’s eyes shot back up to Blaine’s, face blazing as he recalled countless dreams past where he was stretched out and lips ghosted over every particle of his skin. “No I haven’t, what are you _talking_ about?” 

“What is your _angle_ here?” Blaine exploded. “I keep trying to wrap my head around it, how you can be alive, why you’re here, who you’re with, but _none_ of it is adding up! Especially how you’re... _reacting_ to everything, so tell me: What is your _angle_?” 

“Well your guess is as good as mine!” Kurt said bitterly. “Considering I can’t bloody _remember_ anything.” 

“What do you mean you can’t remember anything?” Blaine folded his arms. 

“I mean, I remember singing I Wanna Hold Your Hand to my glee club back in Ohio, and the next thing I know I’m washing up on the bank of a river a whole _continent_ away with two years of my life missing!” 

Blaine’s entire face fell. “ _What_?” You don’t remember _anything_?” 

“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you!” Kurt said exasperatedly. “I don’t know what I did to you to make you hate me, I don’t even know you! And one moment you’re trying to kill me, and the next you’re kissing me and I’ve been trying to piece it all together in my head, but things just aren’t adding up and--” 

He broke off, feeling shaken, and just wanting to curl in on himself. 

“And...I don’t think that I’ve ever been kissed before, because I can’t remember if I have, but I can’t think of another way to explain this...” He cradled his left hand to his chest, looking at the ring.

A warm hand reached over, holding his left hand, a thumb tracing his ring. When Blaine spoke, his voice was quiet. Rough. Almost hoarse. 

“What do you need to know?”

***

Blaine held the cold hand in his own, tracing the ring that he’d bought all those months ago with his thumb, feeling like he was out of his body. 

Kurt looked up at him--sweet Kurt, _brilliant_ Kurt, _his_ Kurt--with those big blue-green eyes that he’d been without for eight months and he wanted nothing better than to wrap him up in his arms and _never_ let him go again. 

But Kurt was shaken and confused and he had no idea what exactly he’d been up to in the past eight months, so that was paramount. Figuring out the situation. Assessing what needed to be done. Getting his quartermaster, his fiance, his Kurt to safety. 

And so he sat, waiting for the questions to come.

Kurt licked his lips and Blaine’s resolve might have wavered.

“You came to Ohio, right? That’s how we met?”

“Yes,” Blaine nodded. 

“I hacked into MI6 and got the file. Most of it was redacted.”

“Standard policy,” Blaine shrugged. “Our Quartermaster was very thorough.” 

Kurt paled slightly at that, and Blaine watched carefully. Did Kurt even know that he’d been Quartermaster?

“And I was your mark, right?” Kurt continued. 

Blaine blinked in surprise. “I mean, that’s one way of putting it, I guess.”

“Did I hack into MI6?” 

“Multiple times,” Blaine nodded. “It was actually pretty impressive, considering you were only seventeen at the time.”

“Did I ever do something bad enough to be considered a national threat?” Kurt hedged carefully.

Blaine snorted. “Try international. That stunt you pulled with your shoulder hard drive shut down the entirety of MI6.”

“Right...” Kurt said quietly. He looked slightly ill.

Blaine leaned forward. “Is that all you wanted to--”

“Did we ever kiss?”

“Yes,” Blaine nodded. 

Kurt stared at him. “Were you my first kiss?”

“I have no idea,” Blaine shrugged. 

Kurt was silent for a moment. “What was it like?”

“What was what like?”

“Our first kiss together,” Kurt murmured, not looking at him.

Blaine smiled slightly at the memory. “You wanted to know how to make a proper martini. We got tipsy. The kiss itself was pretty sloppy and off centered and then you called me a ‘bad boy’ and spent the next five minutes on the ground giggling.”

Kurt looked mortified.

Blaine shrugged. “You never were one for strong liquor.”

“Right,” Kurt nodded. “Did we sleep together?”

Blaine’s mouth went dry. “Do you really want to know?”

“ _Yes_.”

“Yes, we did.”

“Okay,” Kurt nodded again, though Blaine could see the signs of panic. “Do you know why there isn’t a trace of me on the internet for the past two and a half years?”

“You’re pretty good at covering your tracks,” Blaine shrugged. “You’ve never really been one to leave a cyber trail.”

Kurt sat, brow furrowed in concentration as he pieced everything together. “Have I killed anyone?”

Blaine hesitated. It was all the answer Kurt needed.

“Oh,” Kurt said quietly. “Alright. Have I done anything _really_ bad?”

“That depends,” Blaine said, pulling his hand back. 

Kurt looked up, eyes bright. “Depends?”

“On what exactly you’ve done since you washed up on that river bank,” Blaine said evenly. “You’ve been working with Eris, right?”

Kurt’s eyes widened. “What gives you that impression?”

“Your associate, E. We’ve already gathered enough information about him--the fact that he popped back up recently, and has multiple aliases in the past.” 

“Blaine, you’ve got it all wrong--”

“Have I?” Blaine challenged. 

“Yes!” Kurt said exasperatedly. “E’s not Eris, okay?”

“Really?” Blaine asked skeptically. “How am I supposed to know that you’re telling the truth and not just helping one of your new _friends_?” And, there it was. The jealousy. He’d read E’s file, knew the sort of relationships he tended to have with his secretaries, and that fact had just cropped up in his mind, along with Kurt’s devotion to him and how he was willing to die for him--

“Because _I’m_ Eris.” 

Blaine’s mind went blank. “Wait, what?”

 


	6. Chapter 6

Chapter 6

***

“I’m Eris,” Kurt repeated, looking at him expectantly. 

“What do mean you’re Eris?” Blaine frowned. “You _can’t_ be Eris.” 

Kurt’s eyebrows shot up as he crossed his arms. “And why not?”

“Well the _timeline_ , for one thing,” Blaine said, trying to point out the obvious. “You’re nineteen. Well, I guess almost twenty now. But you hadn’t even been _born_ when Eris was in the prime of their power.” 

“Oh, and E had?” Kurt shot back. “He’s only twenty-five!”

Blaine opened his mouth, and then closed it. “It still doesn’t make sense.”

“We come and go, but the titles stay the same,” Kurt countered, wondering where the hell those words had even come from. They were familiar but he couldn’t place from where.

“You’re another Eris?” Blaine realized. Kurt nodded. “Who’s the original?”

“I can’t tell you,” Kurt shook his head. 

“Well why do you get to be the successor?” 

“I was their pupil,” Kurt said stiffly, avoiding eye contact. 

It clicked into place in Blaine’s brain. “Your _mother_?”

Kurt looked up at him, eyes wide. “How did you--”

“You told me once that your mother taught you everything you knew about computers. Who else would it be?”

Kurt stared at him. “Why on earth would I have told _you_ that?”

Blaine raised his eyebrows at the accusing tone. “Well, to be fair, I _had_ just shagged your brains out.” 

Kurt flushed, feeling suddenly very naked in only a tank top and trousers, trying to cover it with a snort. “Yeah. _Right_.”

“You have a mole the size of a dime on your left cheek.”

Kurt’s face scrunched in confusion. “What are you talking about? No I don’t.”

Blaine smirked. “Not _that_ cheek.”

Kurt was about to ask what the hell Blaine was on about when he understood and heat engulfed his face. “Oh.”

“I’m _intimately_ acquainted with it.”  

Kurt’s mind kicked into hyperdrive, running through the facts as best as he could. There were already several contradicting factors that he was trying to sort out and it didn’t help that he didn’t really know where he stood with Blaine. He’d been a mark and they’d been intimate. If he didn’t know better, he’d say at times that Blaine seemed almost...teasingly fond of him, to the extent that he might even think that they’d maybe been more than just a one-time thing. 

But the evidence for that didn’t add up. Blaine was gorgeous, and deadly, and charming, and clever, if his file was anything to go by. Sure, Kurt knew that he was nothing to snuff at, he had his own skill sets that were highly unique and would set him apart from the fray, but that was the _point_. He was the type that Blaine dealt with on a daily basis. To Blaine, he _was_ normal. Agent 007 had numerous suitors (admittedly, half of them wanted him dead, but still) so why on earth would he be fixated with Kurt of all people?

Plus the way he was saying that he was intimately acquainted with a mark on Kurt’s ass suggested practiced teasing, but there was an underlying tension to the jab that Kurt couldn’t quite put his finger on.

And if there _had_ been something, did Kurt even want to know, considering that Blaine had ended up plugging two bullets into him?

Kurt opened his mouth, wording his next statement carefully. “I hurt you in some way, didn’t I? Paris, right?”

Blaine’s smirk disappeared instantly, his entire face dropping before smoothing over into an indecipherable mask. “It was a bad hit. We all lost someone that day.”

Kurt almost didn’t want to ask, but the words rushed out of him. “Who did you lose?”

Blaine looked up at him then, his gaze piercing, and then sad. “My fia--my boyfriend.”

“Oh,” Kurt said quietly. “He’s...dead?”

Blaine’s mouth opened wide before he paused. “No. But I lost him. And I don’t know how to get him back.”

Lost. Meaning that he was probably captured by the enemy. The words settled over Kurt with a cold certainty and he couldn’t shake the nagging feeling that he was somehow involved, somehow to blame for what happened.  

If he was, no wonder Sebastian had exploded at him. No wonder Blaine had shot him.

“We should get to bed,” Blaine said curtly, snapping him out of his thoughts. 

“Okay,” Kurt nodded, moving to slide off the bed and head over to the couch.

Blaine caught his wrist sharply. “No. Same bed. There’s now way I’m letting you out of my sight.”

“That’s hardly necessary,” Kurt huffed as he climbed on the right side, curling away from Blaine. He jumped when he felt a hand tug at his waist. “What are you _doing_?”

“Making sure that you don’t try and run off,” Blaine grumbled as he wrapped his arms around Kurt tightly, like a lazy octopus. “It wouldn’t be a good idea if you did. There’s nothing on this earth that could stop me from finding you.”

“I won’t,” Kurt grumbled back, trying to think of another quip to fire off, but his eyelids were too heavy and he drifted off to sleep. 

***

Blaine woke up slowly, feeling warm and not hungover for once. He was also hugging a fairly large pillow, which he really liked the feel of. He’d have to ask Sebastian where he’d gotten this pillow, it was magic. 

And warm, wow where could you even _get_ heated pillows? 

And...breathing.

Blaine’s eyes shot open. 

He was on a bed that was most definitely not the one he’d been sleeping on the past week and his eye was at level with another, extremely foreign and yet incredibly familiar. Large and gold and unblinking with a horizontal slit of a pupil which, at that angle, he could faintly see a USB drive further inside. 

And then rich swatches of multicoloured ink swirling out from the single eye in a multitude of suckers and tentacles, in patterns that his eyes were intimately familiar with--his fingers were intimately familiar with, his _tongue_ was intimately familiar with--and it was so close, so it’d be okay to taste, right?

As if hearing his half-muddled thought, a warm hand smoothed through his hair, bringing his head closer, and he pressed his lips against the inked skin, tilting his head up to a collarbone and licking across it. 

There was a half-irritated, half-pleased grumbling noise from just above the collarbone, and he smiled lazily, kissing along it as he shifted, flopping his weight over onto the lovely warmth--Kurt, his mind supplied lazily, it was Kurt--as he started kissing up from the collarbone to a thrumming neck.

Kurt’s hand tightened in his hair and his smile widened into a grin as he moved up to the  shell of Kurt’s ear, kissing behind it, his fingers trailing up his left shoulder, swirling around the familiar ridges and inky patterns before they halted abruptly, catching on a ridge that he didn’t know, right above the end of Kurt’s collarbone. 

He stopped moving, his fingers softly outlining that circular little ridge, brain violently waking up and catching up as several thoughts shoved their way to the forefront--why didn’t he know that ridge and why did he have the feeling that he was supposed to be waking up _again_ , like this was a very specific dream that he’d seen play over and over. 

And then the events of the prior day hit him, and he realized that he wasn’t waking up a second time, pulled from deep Kurt-saturated slumber because this was _real_ , Kurt was _real_ , and that he was currently tracing the scar of a bullet wound. 

One that was eight months old, if he’d have to guess. 

He sat up sharply, body humming with adrenaline as he stared down at the figure below him. 

Kurt was sprawled out, slowly waking up from the sudden movement, his hair flopping down over his forehead, still without a shirt on to aid the healing of his arm from the bullet it had taken the night prior. 

He looked different. Not just the two gunshot scars--one above his collarbone and one on his right hip--but there were other changes in the eight months since Blaine had last seen him. He no longer looked pale and half-starved with bags under his eyes, but warm and a bit more filled out and rested. His hair was just a bit longer and he had different glasses.

But most of all it was the eyes. The eyes that used to light up whenever Blaine would walk into the room, despite whatever mood Kurt would currently be in. 

Kurt’s eyelids fluttered, and he frowned lightly in confusion. He reached forward suddenly, grabbing Blaine’s arm with surprising strength and pulling him down. 

Blaine’s eyebrows shot up in surprise as Kurt kissed him, firmly and lazily on the lips, wrapping his uninjured arm around Blaine’s neck tightly, flopping a leg across the back of Blaine’s legs. 

Blaine laughed, breaking the kiss. “Um, Kurt. You might want to wake up all the way.”

Kurt had a look of sleepy annoyance and attempted concentration on his face that was so cute that Blaine just wanted to kiss it off. But instead he waited, as Kurt’s eyes blinked open and became clearer with awareness, shaking off the sleep. 

Those eyes that didn’t light up when they fully focused because he didn’t really know Blaine at all.

And then they widened as Kurt let out a yelp, scrambling back from him. 

“And there it is,” Blaine said, hiding behind a grin as he rolled off to the side. Kurt quickly hoarded all of the blankets up around him like a large and involved nest.

“What on earth were you doing?” Kurt hissed, cocooning himself further. 

“Well, you _were_ the one to drag me down for a snog,” Blaine grinned, inching towards the blanket nest. 

“I thought I was dreaming,” Kurt mumbled. “I didn’t realize-- _stop doing that_.” He scooted back to counter Blaine’s minute advances.

Blaine laughed over his slight twinge of jealousy--hell, he was jealous over a _dream_ now, that had to be a new low for him, thank _god_ Sebastian wasn’t here--as he held up his hands, halting his inching. “As you wish.”

Kurt grumbled something unintelligible as he grabbed a pillow, hugging it to his fort, like a weird facsimile of a door. 

The light from the window caught the ring on his finger, causing it to reflect around the little house. 

Blaine didn’t want to push, but he couldn’t stop himself from asking, just _hoping_ that the answer would be what he wanted it to be. “Where did you get that ring?”

Kurt’s eyes widened as he glanced down at it, his hand suddenly then shooting into the blanket fort. “I...um, I got it as a...present. From my--my grandmother.”

Blaine stared. “Your grandmother.”

“Yes,” Kurt nodded emphatically. “From Greece. Family heirloom. I got it when I came of age.”

Blaine covered his mouth to hide his laugh, managing to wrangle it into a cough. “Your...grandmother...from Greece. Right.”

“Yeah, mom was half-Greek,” Kurt went on. “Hence, you know, the whole Eris thing...”

“About that,” Blaine said, settling over against the foot of the bed. “We need to talk.” 

“Right,” Kurt mumbled as he wrapped the blankets more snuggly around himself. “What do you want to know?”

***

Kurt stared at the agent across from him. The deadly, lethal, terrifying, _devastatingly handsome_ agent in front of him. 

He mentally shook his head at himself. _No_ , this wasn’t how this was supposed to go. He was supposed to be able to predict people, to foresee situations, to hack their files and get a birds eye view of everything.

Blaine Anderson, however, was proving to be the exception to that rule. Kurt just couldn’t get a read on him, or his motivations. He was charming and handsome, but also a spy, and he seemed to know Kurt better than he priorly thought, but he’d also shot him not too long ago. 

And now he wanted answers about Eris, which Kurt would normally guard with his life, but Blaine had made the connection, he’d been the only person to guess who Eris had been to Kurt--the only person to straight up accurately guess Eris’s true identity, as far as Kurt could tell--and why would he tell Blaine that his mother had taught him everything if he didn’t trust him in some capacity?

But if Kurt trusted him, had he been betrayed? Because two bullet wounds didn’t just come out of thin air. 

So he kept his secrets close and waited for the questions.

“Eris was your mother?”

“Yes,” Kurt nodded. “Before she and dad met it was her sort of...hobby.”

Blaine stared at him. “Hobby.” 

Kurt shrugged. “She was...a bit eccentric.”

“And then she passed away,” Blaine nodded. “That’s why Eris stopped posting.”

Kurt gave a jerky nod. “Yeah. Cancer.”

He missed the lost look that Blaine gave him.

“And you took up the mantle of Eris after the incident in Paris,” Blaine said, piecing it all together. “Because of Atlas?” 

“Not entirely,” Kurt shrugged. “I mean, he played a big part, but it was always my post-high school plan to follow in mom’s footsteps. And I saw that I hadn’t in the past two years, so I decided to resurrect her.”

“Post...high school...” Blaine rubbed his eyes with a sigh. “Only you, Kurt. Only you. So what about the Apple?”

Kurt hesitated, trying to think up a way around it. 

Blaine’s eyes flashed. “Kurt. The Apple. If Atlas is after it, we need to find out a way to stop him.”

Kurt groaned. “Okay, the main problem was the legend, right? Eris puts an apple out into a wedding, carved that it has to go to the most beautiful, the finest, the _best_ , and then three goddesses fight over it because they all think that’s them. And that was mom’s intent. To create her own apple and have contenders for it, before giving it to the best, essentially.” 

“But she died before she could do that,” Blaine mused. “So everyone thought it was up for grabs.”

“Well...okay,” Kurt started before catching himself, glancing at Blaine and just going along with the fib. “Yes, right. That’s what happened. But starting about three years ago, as far as I can tell, interest in the Apple peaked up again. I didn’t know back then because I was still in school, and I don’t know if I was ever made aware of the fact in the time since, but everyone seemed to draw the conclusion that Eris must have died and that the Apple was fair game for whoever could find it.”

“Kurt, what _is_ the Apple, exactly.”

“It’s hard to explain, but it was a sort of master code for the internet. It could infiltrate any system, rewrite it, plant seeds, grow trees with branches that would spread, bloom, create more apples within the system, seed, and grow more trees, making the world wide web into her own sort of vision of Hesperides’ garden.” 

Blaine stared at him. “Kurt, that’s terrifying.”

Kurt shrugged. “Terrifying, visionary, however you want to label it. And she didn’t want to just do it herself, she wanted to put it in what she believed to be the right hands. Create an internet free of government surveillance, its own separate entity, able to thrive on its own and flourish.” 

“But she never finished it,” Blaine frowned. “So what exactly was it supposed to be? Is it an online code or...?”

“No, that would’ve been way too easy to find and have it fall into the wrong hands,” Kurt shook his head. “She had a physical copy. She was trying to make it into an entire golden apple, full of different slices, but she ran out of time.”

“Slice?” Blaine raised his eyebrow. 

“Like an apple slice? She was forming the Apple with different slices, USBs, microdisk slots, etc. The skin was a sort of gold micro fiber with code written into the metal itself to recognize the owner’s finger pad so that only they could access it.”

“So whatever your mother had left of that, Atlas is trying to find--”

“That’s the problem,” Kurt interrupted quietly. “I don’t think that this is what they’re after.”

Blaine frowned. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, I’ve been intercepting data around the Apple for the past eight months, and one of the slices has never been brought up once. I think--” He broke off, wondering how far he should go.

Blaine just sat silently, looking at him expectedly. “Go on. This could be important. Maybe it’s why you got shot.”

Kurt grew cold at his words, the scars on his shoulder and hip in particular. “It’s nothing, actually. I was just thinking out loud.”

Blaine nodded, but he didn’t look like he particularly believed him. “So do you have any idea who Atlas could be?”

“I saw a picture, but he doesn’t look familiar. Granted, I have two years missing, so he could be my boyfriend for all I know,” he laughed. 

Blaine let out a laugh as well, but it sounded off for some reason.

“Pretty generic though for hacker types. White. Glasses. Semi-lazy clothes,” Kurt shrugged. “I could maybe ID him on the street, but his face isn’t particularly remarkable.” 

Blaine nodded, taking in the information. “Do you know if your mother had any enemies?”

Kurt snorted. “Try half the world governments, plus the envy of most other hackers.”

“Okay, rephrase, did your mother have any _friends_?” 

Kurt hesitated. “Not...in so many words, but maybe.”

“What do you mean?”

“She _did_ have another pupil. Before I was born. He was called Daedalus.”

“Like Daedalus and Icarus?” Blaine clarified. “The builder of the Labyrinth?” 

“Yeah,” Kurt nodded. “I don’t remember him though. I think he was around when I was really young, but she only ever brought him up once when I was younger while she was teaching me how to write code.”

Blaine mulled over the information. “So there’s potential interest in finding Daedalus, if that’s at all possible.” There was a shift in his expression that Kurt barely caught before he turned to look back up at him. “So what about E?”

“What about him?” Kurt crossed his arms. 

“How did you start working with him?” Blaine asked. 

“Job interview. We both liked what we saw.” Okay, that might not have been exactly how it went down, but Kurt knew to keep his friends close during an interrogation until he could figure out the angle that his interrogator was coming from. 

There was a slight twitch in the corner of Blaine’s jaw. “What is he planning?”

“I don’t see how that’s relevant,” Kurt shot back.

“Ah. You’re together.”

“What?” Kurt spluttered, face turning red. 

“I mean it makes sense. Get a secretary. Woo them. Date them. It keeps them loyal, especially if the work is dangerous and they’re liable to be asked hard questions.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Kurt folded his arms tightly. “Though it sounds like _you’re_ speaking from experience.” 

“Then prove me wrong,” Blaine shot back, mirroring Kurt’s posture. “Tell me what E is up to.”

“I’m not going to tell _you_ anything about my friends,” Kurt snapped. “And you can’t make me.”

“Oh trust me,” Blaine smirked. “There are _plenty_ of ways that I can make you.”

That was a threat. Blaine had just threatened him, so he should be feeling _terrified_ now, not _turned on_. 

Blaine got up suddenly--Kurt, you’re not supposed to feel _let down_ by that--and tugged off his shirt--Kurt, _no_ \--throwing it across the room. “We can’t stay here. Too risky. We’ll leave within the hour, so if you have to shower, do it now. 

Instead of replying, Kurt just sat, staring at Blaine’s bare back that was riddled with scars, except for one area. A patch of skin over his right shoulder blade that had a chess piece inked into it. A black queen. 

Kurt opened his mouth to ask about the tattoo before clamping it shut tightly and looking away when Blaine dropped his pants as well, heading into the bathroom. 

***

“So you were the secret service agent everyone was prattling about,” Sebastian mused as he refilled his glass at the bar. “What’s your poison? Vodka? Gin? Whiskey? Scotch?”

“None, thanks,” Evans waved his hand. “But if you have a Heineken or a Bud Light, I’ll take that.”

Sebastian stared at him, looking like he’d never been so offended in his entire life. “Americans,” he muttered, breaking the gaze as he took a long drink from his glass. 

“Let me get this straight,” Jesse groaned, sprawled across the sofa. “Young Miss Jones receives threats about her father and family’s security unless her compliance is assured. But she reasons that her compliance will, in itself, do exactly what she fears most, so she sees fit to solve the problem by simply taking herself out of the equation.” He gave a considering look, finally shrugging. “I have to say, it is fairly neat.”

“She wouldn’t tell me where she was going though,” Evans said, his arms folded tightly. 

“Well that’s a bit obvious,” Sebastian snorted. “She didn’t know who she could trust in the secret service and she didn’t want half a security detail trying to follow her.”

“No, that’s not what I meant,” Evans protested, breaking off with a sigh. “Look, I just need to find her, alright? Off the books, however it is you double-oh agents do it.”

Jesse sighed, turning towards Sebastian. “Do you want to do it, or shall I?”

“I’ll take the honors, dear,” Sebastian winked at him, and then they both had guns pulled on Evans. 

“What the hell?” Evans spluttered.

“Now now now,” Sebastian tutted, twirling his empty glass around. “Even supposing we were interested in the assignment, what possible insurance could you give us that you’re actually invested in the safety of the president’s daughter and not the mole that everyone seems to think that you are?”

“Because without evidence, we kind of have to shoot you,” Jesse said, mock apologetically.

Evans eyed both of the barrels. “I don’t have any proof, _but_ \--” He added as they both took aim. “I don’t care if you kill me. Do it if it’ll make you feel better, just _please_. Promise me that you’ll find her and make sure that she’s safe. If you need me out of the way to do that, then that’s fine, just... _please_.” 

“You’re in love with her,” Jesse said as more of a statement than a question. 

“Jesus bloody _fuck_ ,” Sebastian let out as he dropped his gun in favor of his bottle of Grey Goose. “Seriously what is this--the year of agents loving their marks? It’s ridiculous.”

“So you’ll help?” Evans asked hopefully.

“Might as well,” Sebastian grumbled. “As long as 007 is still MIA.”

“Do you have any leads about where she might have gone?” Jesse pressed. 

Evans nodded. “Yeah, she did her best to erase the evidence, but she’d been in contact with that hacker here in Paris, the one who disabled all of Atlas’ protocols.”

Jesse’s shoulders sank as he looked over at Sebastian.

Sebastian looked like he was told to go skinny dipping in a volcano, and he took another drink. 

***

They ended up in the honeymoon suite of an art deco hotel in the heart of Paris. 

Blaine took a modicum of pleasure watching Kurt look around wide-eyed, taking in the lush furnishings. The Kurt he knew would never admit it, but he knew that he had a weakness for grand romantic gestures. 

The most efficient and ruthless interrogation technique: wooing him beyond belief. 

(And fine, he might have had another ulterior motive for the whole affair.)

“The honeymoon suite,” Kurt said dryly with a nod, trying to seem nonchalant as he sat down gingerly on the satin king-sized bed. “This is...excessive.”

“Easier to hideout,” Blaine shrugged, moving over to close the curtains. “MI6 knows I tend to prefer the smaller dives, so they’re not gonna check the place.” And that was just a blatant lie, but what Kurt didn’t know couldn’t hurt him. “Plus...” he turned back to Kurt. “I have a present for you.”

“Really?” Kurt asked skeptically, crossing his arms. 

Blaine grinned, nodding. “Look under the pillow.”

Kurt frowned at him but turned, pulling four excessive pillows off the bed until he reached the mattress. He let out a half-strangled noise of excitement as he turned back to Blaine, eyes bright. “A laptop?”

“Well, we currently need to keep MI6, the CIA, _and_ Atlas off our tracks,” Blaine shrugged. “I figured you could rig us up some security, keep an eye on our surroundings.”

“I definitely can,” Kurt said eagerly as he opened the case, but frowned little box that popped up on the screen. “Password?”

“Oh, blackQueen. One word and the Q’s capitalized.”

Kurt nodded, typing it in and gaining access. “Why that password? Chess fan?” he asked faintly, recalling the tattoo he’d seen just a few hours prior.

Blaine smiled as he moved about the room, doing his usual sweep for bugs. “No, but my boyfriend was. I’m more of a poker fan.”

Kurt snorted. “Why, the monetary gain?”

“No,” Blaine shook his head. “It’s more about reading people. You can play a person with poker and win solely on that, with no help from the cards at all. Chess on the other hand...you can read a person a bit in chess, and play them, but the amount of calculation needed combined with spontaneity... Poker lets you win because people reveal who they are when they’re gambling with their own skin. Chess is an architect’s game. A game for a god. Someone who can expend collateral and...” He broke off, shaking his head. “Never mind.”

“Go on,” Kurt said, crossing his arms. 

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Oh really? Impart your wisdom about chess players onto the world, Mr. Anderson, I’m _dying_ to hear.”

Blaine shot him a look. “It’s what your kind does. The hackers. You, Eris, Atlas. You all move your pieces around without having to worry about collateral damage because _nothing_ gets close to you.”

“Excuse me?” Kurt snapped, shoving the laptop off of his lap. “Are you really putting me and my _mother_ in the same category as Atlas?” 

“No, I’m trying--” Blaine sighed, rubbing at his eyes. “I’m not saying that it’s necessarily a damning trait per se, but it can lead to horrible consequences.”

Kurt just stared at him.

“Something--some _one_ did get close to you, Kurt,” Blaine elaborated. “And look what happened.”

Kurt’s shoulders dropped as he looked down at his chest, presumedly thinking, as Blaine was, about the bullet wounds that he still carried the scars of.

“Are you trying to...I don’t know, threaten me?”

“I’m trying to warn you. I’m saying that even without a memory, you already know what the dangers are. I’m trying to give you an _out_.”

Kurt blinked. “What do you mean, an _out_?”

“I mean that we could leave. Drop everything and just go.” 

Kurt felt his temper spike. “Tell me something, Blaine Anderson: Do you honestly think that I’m that small?”

Blaine looked startled. “What?” 

“Do you think so little of me that you just assume that if I got hurt I’d be scared off? That I was some puppet master waiting in the wings who can’t comprehend real danger? I know very well what the dangers can be, Blaine Anderson!” There was a bolt and three supports in his left shoulder to prove that.

“Kurt, that’s not what I meant--” Blaine tried quietly, but he was cut off.

“And what on earth makes you think that I would trust myself to your care, let alone _want_ to go _anywhere_ with you?” Kurt continued, mind searching for a topic that he _knew_ irked Blaine and would set him off--Elliot. Blaine disliked Elliot for some reason. “I mean _maybe_ if it were E, but--”

Blaine stood up then, pushing the chair sharply to the side and Kurt tensed, fighting the urge to flinch back. 

“Let’s make one thing perfectly clear here,” Blaine said in a low steady voice, leaning against the bed. “While you might not believe it now, there was a time when you would have-- _and did_ , despite all reason not to--trust me with your life. And at that time? I could have just given you a look and you would have gone _anywhere_ with me.”

Kurt was still, unable to stop the warmth creeping up his neck. 

“So if you want to continue with whatever the _hell_ is going on here, that’s fine. I’ll come out guns blazing as usual. I just thought you might like more than one option, considering that you hate being backed into corners.” 

He pushed himself off the bed and left the room. 

***

It was almost comedic when it happened. 

One second, Tina was standing outside of M’s office, straightening her shoulders before she went in, the next, she had the door open, breaking the soundproof seal, and the shouts of two--for lack of a better term--divas shrieking and echoing down the hallway. 

Part of her wanted to close the door and open it again, over and over to create a sort of pattern, but instead she just opened it wider and stepped in. 

“We have our operation in Paris and it’s yielding _results_ , I might add!” Rachel Berry shouted, her voice drowning everything else out. “There’s no reason that you should compromise that!”

“Funny that you weren’t saying _that_ , Miss Berry, when you let three of my agents onto French soil!” M shot back, her usually unflappable facade slightly strained for once. 

“That--was a tactical error!”

“It was not, as we both well know, Miss Berry!” M snapped. “In case it has somehow slipped your mind, you used to be one of mine, and make no mistake that despite all of your ‘clandestine’ meetings, I was well aware of your relationship with 004. Now, I have a meeting with 003 here, so kindly get out of my office.”

Rachel gathered her briefcase, shooting M a nasty glare. “This isn’t over!” Her cheeks were red as she stomped towards the door. 

“Hey Rachel!” Tina said with a cheerful smile.

“Shut up, Tina,” Rachel muttered as she slammed the door tightly in her face.

Tina turned back to M, the smile settling into what R referred to as the “patented double-oh smirk”. “She always did like to make an exit.” 

“That she did,” M said quietly, leaning back in her chair. “Now, 003. I have an assignment for you.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Tina nodded. “With whom?”

“Did I say that you were going with a partner?”

Tina froze, her brain processing. “Wait, you’re...you’re letting me go on a mission without another double-oh?”

“As long as you don’t disappoint me,” M said flatly. “Like the last time.”

“Of course not, ma’am,” Tina replied quickly. “This will be nothing like the last time. You have my word.”

“Actions speak louder, 003. And this assignment will require a steady hand.”

Tina set her shoulders resolutely. “Tell me what needs to be done.”

***

_“What?”_

“Santana, I need help. Your help, I need your help.”

_“Blaine, are you_ **_drunk_ ** _?”_

“No. Oh right, yes. I am.”

_“Okay well, sober up. I have something to tell you.”_

“So do I, that’s why I called.”

_“No, trust me, this is way more important.”_

“No it’s not, ‘cause see, Kurt’s--”

_“Kurt’s alive.”_

“--al--yeah. Wait, how did you know that?” 

_“Long story. How did_ **_you_ ** _know that?”_

“Well, we’re on the run right now. He’s upstairs.” 

_“He’s apparently been helping Mercedes Jones hide, clearing the way for her, giving her aliases, etc. He sent her to us yesterday.”_

“Typical. Even after being dead for eight months he finds a way to get his hands entangled with international affairs.”

_“Blaine, your_ **_fiance_ ** _comes back from the dead and you’re getting drunk at a bar, by the sounds of it. What the hell is going on?”_

“He doesn’t remember me, Santana. Nothing. Not even the whole Crown incident, it’s all gone. And I can’t just ask him what he’s thinking because he doesn’t bloody trust me anymore and he’s hiding secrets and I can’t get a read on him and it’s _awful_ , alright?”

_“...”_

“Sorry. It’s just been a really long day.”

_“Whatever, Anderson. Look, if you wanted a dirty martini, you should have asked for olive brine instead of salting it up with your tears.”_

“...I genuinely can’t tell if you’re being serious or giving me a metaphor here.”

_“Two for one deal. First off, stop crying in your martini. Second, you and Kurt were always going to be dirty. In the metaphorical martini way, and the wanky way.”_

“Glad we got that incredibly important distinction out of the way.”

_“Look, you two are in one of the toughest lines of work on the planet and yet you two still managed to somehow make it work. Call a spade a spade here. Don’t try to dress up what you have and call it clean when it’s obviously not.”_

“So...don’t use tears to make a dirty martini since I’ll just delude myself into thinking that it’s a clean one? And...ditto with Kurt? Don’t try to come at our relationship from a conventional way when it clearly isn’t?”

_“Exactly. Call a spade a spade. Play_ **_dirty_ ** _.”_

“You know, I’m definitely drunk enough to the point where this makes perfect sense and I think it’s a good idea.” 

_“Perfect. Now come on, he’s Kurt. We know him, we can definitely play dirty here.”_

“But who’s to say if he’s really the same though? He has gone through quite a bit.”

_“He sent Mercedes to mine and Britt’s safe house. He probably didn’t realize consciously whose it was, but subconsciously he had to know that she’d be safe and with safe people if he sent her here. Trust me, he’s still in there somewhere. Now, there’s a three step process here.”_

“I’m listening.”

_“Step one: Woo him.”_

“I...kind of am.”

_“Really? How so?”_

“Fanciest hotel in Paris. Honeymoon suite. I’m having champagne brought up later too.” 

_“Blaine, all of that is useless if he doesn’t trust you. You can’t woo him unless you’ve done the other steps.”_

“Then why is it step _one_?”

_“I never said they were in any particular order. Now, step two: Give him what he wants.”_

“And what exactly is that?”

_“He’s your fiance. You should know that.”_

“He could want anything, I’m not entirely sure where to go from here.” 

_“Come on, there had to be one thing he always wanted but you always denied him. Something that he’d want even now.”_

“No there’s--actually...yeah. Yeah, there is. That’s not a bad plan.” 

_“Told you so.”_

“What’s step three?”

_“Simple. Tell him the truth.”_

“What.”

_“I’m serious. Tell him the truth. Everything. How you feel, what you went through, how you met, the whole nine yards. But most importantly, let him know that you don’t expect anything from him.”_

“...”

_“Blaine? Look, if you don’t--”_

“No, I know. And I don’t expect anything from him, it’s just... I’ve tried, you know? I’ve tried hinting things at him to gauge his reaction but it doesn’t really seem like he sees me in that way. And I will tell him the truth and that he’s not obligated to me in any way or anything. But...when I do...if he does nothing, or doesn’t care...I know that it’ll break me at least for a little bit. And I guess I’m just trying to prolong this short period of him being oblivious.”

_“Don’t prolong it too long, Blaine. He deserves to know that you care about him incase someone decides to use him as a pawn down the line.”_

“I know I just...I don’t want to lose him again.”

_“You’re in danger of losing him in more ways than one no matter which course of action you choose. You might as well clear the air between you two before anything bad happens.”_

“Okay. Will do.”

_“Good luck. Oh, and Blaine?”_

“Yeah?”

_“Sober up first.”_

***

Kurt sat on the large bed in the honeymoon suite--god, the _honeymoon_ suite--thinking over his options. 

He’d pissed off a double-oh agent. One who he was currently stuck with for the time being, so he may as well at least attempt to get along with him so they could both figure out what the hell was going on.

But what he’d said, the last thing right before he left...

_“I just thought you might like more than one option, considering that you hate being backed into corners.”_

It was true, he hated it more than anything, but how had Blaine known that?

_“There was a time when you would have--and_ **_did_ ** _, despite all reason not to--trusted me with your life. And at that time? I could have just given a look and you would have gone_ **_anywhere_ ** _with me.”_

Kurt brought his knees up under his chin, his brain firing back and forth, trying to create a coherent timeline of facts. Blaine had come to Ohio at some point when he was seventeen and they’d met for the first time. Kurt had disappeared off the radar shortly after and at some point in the two years, had apparently done sever damage to the MI6 servers and had killed an indeterminate amount of people. 

And Blaine knew him. He knew him _well_. He knew things about Kurt that Kurt had never told anyone, but it wasn’t just that. It wasn’t just like he’d read an in depth file. The way he reacted, how, when his guard was down, he was so _casual_ around Kurt and easy and...

And he’d trusted Blaine with his life, if Blaine’s word was anything to go by. Against all reason not to, as well. 

The two scars on his shoulder and hip served as a bitter reminder of that. 

But Blaine was handsome. And charming. And if he’d come to Ohio with the express interest of seeking out Kurt, so there was no way that Kurt would’ve stood a chance, especially after two years. 

He’d had to have fallen in love with Blaine. 

It made sense. Blaine’s file was riddled with ex lovers who’d fallen in love with him, a good half of them marks, another half just strategy. And sure, a lot of them wanted to kill him now, but jealousy did awful things to people.

Kurt wondered if he’d tried to kill Blaine at one point. He couldn’t really see himself doing it, but...

But he didn’t know what sort of person he’d become in the missing years.

Maybe Blaine was right. He could’ve just been a sort of puppet master pulling strings, not caring about the consequences. He didn’t want to think that was how he ended up, but really, who was he to judge? How did he know that he was really any better than Atlas?

Then again there was the ring on his finger. Why would he try and hurt Blaine if he himself had moved on?

Blaine had a boyfriend though. Maybe he’d moved on because Blaine had. 

That was a regressive line of thought. Maybe he’d gotten out? Found someone who loved him and wanted to spend the rest of their life with him. That was all he’d wanted back in high school, someone to be there to hold his hand. It shouldn’t matter that it wasn’t Blaine Anderson.

But one question still burned in the back of his mind, brighter and louder than all the others:

Had there been any point in time when Blaine had genuinely cared about him?

It was silly and superficial that _that_ was the question that he secretly wanted the answer to the most, but the heart wanted what the heart wanted. 

And now he was thinking with his heart instead of his head. Perfect. 

His thoughts were interrupted when the door to the hotel opened and Blaine walked in, a large bag over his shoulder as he closed the door shut. He looked surprised to see Kurt still on the bed. “So,” he said conversationally. “You didn’t try to run away.” 

“Walking out of the hotel would be stupid, there are too many cameras,” Kurt muttered, looking back down at his laptop, where all of the CCTV cameras were giving him feed in their individual mini rectangles. 

“You could have gone out the window,” Blaine shrugged, pulling off his jacket. 

“The glass is too strong, there’s no way I could’ve broken it,” Kurt said distractedly, typing a nonsensical line of code to give his fingers something to do. 

Blaine snorted. “You’re wearing an ultra high frequency single-digit sonic agitator unit, I hardly think one _window_ would be a problem.”

Kurt looked up at that. “What?” 

Blaine nodded to his left hand. “You know, on your finger.”

Kurt looked down at the ring, a horrible, gut-wrenching feeling settling deep in his stomach. “This is...an ultra high frequency single-digit sonic agitator unit?”

“Yeah, twist it open and it’ll send a charge to shatter most thin surfaces,” Blaine said before pausing. “Wait, you didn’t know?”

“No,” Kurt shook his head. “I never thought--”

He broke off. He’d thought that it was an engagement ring. He’d thought that it was proof that the hell of high school that he’d been through didn’t matter because he _had_ found someone in the end. He’d thought that it could be proof that it didn’t matter to him that he had just been a mark to Blaine because he’d found someone else.

But in the end it was just a gadget. Another cool little trinket of technology. And, once again, he was alone with nothing but his tech. 

“Kurt?” 

Kurt looked back up at Blaine, schooling his features into impassivity. “Nothing. What’s in the bag?”

That seemed to distract Blaine as his eyes lit up. “I have a proposition for you.”

“Okay...”

“We both have information we want from each other that neither of us are particularly willing to give up, so lets leave it to a battle of strategy.”

Kurt moved his laptop aside, folding his hands in his lap. “I’m listening.”

Blaine opened the bag and pulled out a chess set, setting it on the bed. “One game of chess. If I win, you have to grant me one request. If you win, I do the same. If there’s a stalemate, then we both get a request from each other.” 

Kurt felt a warm bubbly sensation as he saw the chessboard laid out across the bedspread. Answers. He was going to get _answers_.

Because there was no way in hell that Blaine Anderson could beat him at chess. 

Fighting back a smirk, he gestured grandly to the board. “Choose your color, Mr. Anderson.”

Blaine looked up at him, mouth slowly curling into a grin. “White.”

***

“What.” 

Blaine shrugged. “You can’t win them all.”

Kurt stared down in disbelief at the chessboard, not quite comprehending what the hell had just happened.

“I mean, it’s not it’s not that bad--”

“One person,” Kurt said through gritted teeth. 

“What?”

“There has only ever been one person that I haven’t been able to win a game of chess against,” Kurt continued. “And that is my _mother_. Who would _slaughter_ me.”

Blaine had the grace to at least look a little sheepish. “Well...at least you didn’t lose?”

“I have _never_ in my life _stalemated_ ,” Kurt snapped. 

“Well technically...” Blaine started before shaking his head. “Never mind. But why are you so mad? Last time--I mean, I didn’t think you’d be this angry about it.”

“Really Blaine? And how did you _think_ I’d react?” Kurt shot back. 

“I don’t know, I thought you might be...intrigued?” Blaine shrugged.

“Intrigued,” Kurt said flatly.

“Forget it. What’s your request?”

“I’m still thinking it over,” Kurt gritted out. He’d come up with his initial request under the assumption that he would’ve have to divulge any information in return. A stalemate opened a floodgate of other possibilities and variables that he hadn’t taken into account. “You first. And if you even think about asking about E--”

“The Apple.”

Kurt started in surprise. “What?”

“Tell me _everything_ you know about it. And I mean everything, because I know that you left some things out. Don’t try to lie either, I figured out your tell years ago.”

Kurt stared at him, weighing his options. He could always refuse the information, but there was still that question that he desperately wanted to ask Blaine--albeit against his better judgement--and there was no way he’d get an answer if he didn’t give one.

And so, measuring his words carefully, he started. “Everyone thinks that the Apple is up for grabs because Eris didn’t have a chance to find the best, the finest, the fairest to give the Apple to, but she did. Well, at least in her eyes.”

“Who?”

Kurt rolled his eyes. “Who’s the fairest, the finest, and the best in _any_ mother’s eyes?”

Blaine stared at him for a short period of time before it clicked. “Her child,” he said quietly. “So _you_ have the Apple?”

“In a manner of speaking,” Kurt said in a clipped voice. “She...she got too sick. She was never able to finish it completely, so I have what remains of it. Just one slice. There were maps, plans, blueprints to go with it, but I lost it when...” He twisted his shoulder uncomfortably, recalling the crack of his mother’s laptop on the pavement. Parts of it had been saved in his slice, but the schematics for everything else...

“And you’ve always had it on you, no matter where you go.”

Kurt looked up at him sharply. “What are you--”

“You put it in that bolt in your chest,” Blaine continued. “And you rewrote part of the code to fit your own style, right? Because it was unfinished, and a lone apple can’t grow into an orchard unless it has help. So you changed the formatting to act like tentacles. Because you can lose one of those and another will just regenerate. No need for expansion, you have a contained microcosm of destruction.” He leaned forward, a finger reaching out to tap the gold glass--well, he supposed it wasn’t actually glass like he’d thought--eye of the octopus on Kurt’s shoulder through his shirt. “One of the world’s most powerful devices...hidden in a nineteen year-old’s shoulder.”

Kurt moved reflexively back, danger warnings flashing in his mind. “And yeah. That’s it.”

“No, it’s not,” Blaine shook his head, leaning closer. “Because you said that you didn’t think that they were looking for a slice. So what is Atlas looking for?”

Kurt gripped the bedspread tightly, heart pounding about what he was about to allegedly admit to. “I...yes, I adapted my slice to better suit me, but I’d always planned on finishing mom’s work. I’d been working on the schematics for it for years but I thought that I’d have to wait until I was nearly thirty to pull off something nearly as amazing as that.”

“What were the plans?” Blaine pressed. 

“I don’t know!” Kurt said desperately. “That’s the problem! I have two years of my life missing, so I have _no_ idea what I could have possibly created!” He folded his arms tightly across his chest, curling up. 

“There has to be more--”

“No, there’s not!” Kurt snapped. “That’s the point, I’m missing most of who I am, and now you know everything! Everything about the hacker who messed up and can’t remember _anything_ about himself! Who clearly didn’t go very far from high school seeing as no one even _missed_ me when I was gone. There were no missing person’s files, no reports, _nothing_. And the _one_ person who actually seems to know me is the person who also _shot_ me, either because I was just a mark or because I might have caused his boyfriend to go missing or whatever!” 

He sat back against the bed, skin tingling and vibrating and honestly, at that moment, he could probably take Blaine Anderson in a fight.

But Blaine Anderson didn’t look ready for a fight, Blaine Anderson was looking extremely confused. “Wait... _who_ shot you?”

Kurt let out a derisive laugh. “Do you want me to refresh your memory?” He started unbuttoning his shirt, pulling it aside and not really caring that it snagged a bit. “Or did you somehow forget about the two bullets you plugged into me?”

“Why on earth do you think _I_ shot you?” Blaine asked, bewildered. 

“Because I was shot a Walther PPK 9mm Short and you’re currently the only living operative on the _planet_ who uses that gun!” Kurt shouted. “So why don’t you just shove--”

“I didn’t shoot you!” Blaine burst out suddenly, seeming to snap out of his daze of confusion. “Kurt, I didn’t shoot you, I’d _never_ shoot you! Okay, there was that _one_ time in the leg, but that was a job requirement and there’s no way I was going to let another double-oh shoot you, especially since Smythe and Crawford were the only other two available. Plus you barely have a scar from that one.” 

Kurt stared. “Wait, the scar on my right thigh?” 

“Yes,” Blaine said emphatically. “That is and was the one time I will _ever_ shoot you, Kurt. I don’t know who the hell got their hands on that gun, but it wasn’t me.”

“You’re lying,” Kurt said. “It has to be you, you were there--”

“No, I _wasn’t_!” Blaine snapped. “I was in London, when you got shot, and I was forced to listen to it over the coms in Q Branch, forced to listen to you struggling for breath and then getting thrown into the water to _drown_. I had to listen and do _nothing_ because I was too far away, because the one time you needed me I wasn’t _there_. So don’t you _dare_ tell me where I was, because there’s nothing I want more in this world than to have been there with you.”

His words washed over Kurt, clashing and contradicting with the picture that he’d drawn in his head of his life since the Paris incident. His mind was too loud, too noisy as it hurriedly rearranged itself, trying to fit everything together, but it was just too nonsensical. “Why were you listening to me in Q Branch?”

Blaine stared at him. “Because you’re my Quartermaster.”

Kurt looked up at him. “ _What_?” 

“You were the Quartermaster of MI6,” Blaine said. “That’s why there were no missing persons reports, no mention of your disappearance. It was classified. You know this, you have our _files_.” 

“They were redacted,” Kurt murmured. “I hacked into MI6 and most of the files were redacted, I couldn’t read most of it.”

Blaine still stared at him like he was missing something vital. “But you have the originals. They’re in your eye drive.”

“What are you talking about?”

Blaine nodded to the hard drive in his shoulder. “All of MI6’s files are in there. You downloaded them the first week of the job.”

Kurt looked down at the bolt, then back up to Blaine. “I can’t access it.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, I’ve changed in two years. I rewrote the password codes, and it’ll give me eight tries before it wipes everything completely clean. I can’t even hack myself into it because it’s too well guarded. I’ve already used five of the tries.” Kurt shook his head, trying to focus, but his brain was still just so _loud_. Quartermaster. Blaine was saying that he was the _Quartermaster_. Which means that Blaine most likely didn’t hate him because Blaine was unfailingly loyal to MI6. And that meant that Kurt was his _superior_. That explained Blaine’s ease around him if they had to work together on missions and oh god, had Kurt fallen in love with a charming agent whom he was responsible for? And what about--

His mind went suddenly blank when two warm hands clasped his shoulders. He looked up and Blaine was much closer, and his eyes were quite large and warm and Kurt’s mind was blissfully silent for a soft moment before snapping back into its frenzied hyper analysis. 

“Let me.”

And holy hell, that was apparently a thing for Kurt. He had no idea what Blaine was asking for and it could’ve been to make orange banana smoothies for all he cared, but he nodded his head. 

Blaine reached forward and gently twisted the bolt out of Kurt’s shoulder like he’d done it a thousand times--now that was an interesting thought--and settled in next to Kurt, fetching his abandoned laptop and plugging it in. 

The laptop screen went black for a few seconds before turning a bright white, one single little password box waiting expectantly. 

Blaine frowned, leaning forward and typing too fast for Kurt’s eyes to catch all of it before he hit enter. 

The box flared red and a little gray six appeared below the box before fading.

“Blaine,” Kurt said warningly. 

“No wait, I know,” Blaine shook his head, typing something else in.

Red again, with a little gray seven.

“Blaine!” Kurt snapped, reaching for the laptop as Blaine just kept typing. He pulled it away. “One more wrong answer and the whole thing’s wiped--”

Blaine dove forward, hitting the enter key.

Kurt’s scream of horror gurgled up in his throat, but then the box turned green. He stared at the screen in disbelief as his desktop started rearranging itself, swirling around in a new pattern with all the files that it had loaded. 

Files about MI6.

Files about each double-oh agent. 

Files that said “Q Branch Minions”.

Files that were marked to be sent to R. 

Thousands of little files swirling in constant motion around the desktop, never staying still, like a little contained galaxy for him to work through. 

“See?” Blaine said quietly. “What did I tell you, Q?”

Kurt started at the signifier, turning back to Blaine. “How the hell did you know the password?”

“Your’s are always pretty easy to guess,” Blaine grinned. “Well, to me at least, not really to anyone else. You pretend like you aren’t, but you’re pretty sentimental. A true romantic deep down. And that bolt sits right next to your heart, so I just went with three of the most obvious answers. Usually I can get it on the first try, but hey, I’ve been rusty.”

Kurt looked back at the screen and at the multitude of swirling files. “This has everything.”

“Yes.”

“Everything I’ve been doing.”

“Yes.”

“No Blaine, I mean...” Excitement creeped into Kurt’s voice. “I mean, I can figure out what Atlas is after! It’s probably here somewhere, heavily encrypted...” Kurt moved through the files, searching, wanting to stop and linger on some, but knowing that he’d have plenty of time after.

There was one always at the edge of the screen, not coming any further so he couldn’t even read the title. And it kept growing and shrinking in size so that it was hard to track. 

“Come here, you,” Kurt muttered, fingers flying over the keys as he pushed and dragged and expanded to bring it further. It took a little longer than he normally would have liked--man, the him that he couldn’t remember was way more paranoid than he’d thought--but finally he cracked it, running a decoding system. 

“Is that it?” Blaine frowned, leaning forward. “It’s a lot...smaller than I thought it would be.”

“I could’ve have hyper compressed it,” Kurt shrugged, leaning forward excitedly before frowning, staring at the file in disbelief. “An mp3? The most encrypted file on my hard drive is an _mp3_?” 

“Huh,” Blaine frowned. “Maybe it’s a really embarrassing recording of you singing?”

“I was in glee club, I’m a great singer,” Kurt snapped. “Well, I guess there’s only one way to find out.”

He hit play.

There was a silence for a short while, before the sound of a door opening and closing. 

_“This is a secure line.”_  

Kurt jumped at the sudden loudness of his voice, turning the volume down a fraction. 

_“Are you alright?”_

Kurt raised his eyebrows at Blaine, as the other man’s recorded voice echoed with confusion.

_“Well that remains to be seen. Blaine, do you know what I keep in those little chess squares that I’ve been developing?”_

_“Those weird little hacker ball things, right? The ones that look like teardrop pin ends?”_

_“They’re called net seeds, but yes, essentially. Now I’m curious as to how you know that, since they’re a personal project that I started two months ago and I’ve never shown them to you.”_

_“I’m sure that you told me about them in passing once or twice...”_

“Wait!” Kurt said, leaning forward. He rewound the audio. 

_“The ones that look like teardrop pin ends?”_

_“They’re called net seeds--”_

Kurt stopped the recording. “Blaine, what did the--Blaine?”

Blaine was staring off at something looking...slightly... _haunted_?

“Blaine?”

He blinked, turning back to Kurt. “Sorry, what?”

“The net seeds,” Kurt pressed. “In the chess square thing I was talking about, what did they look like?”

“Oh,” Blaine frowned. “Um, like pin ends, yeah. Little gold pin ends.”

“Pin ends,” Kurt nodded. “Or apple seeds?”

Blaine stared at him while it clicked into place in his brain. “The net seeds had to do with the Apple.”

“And I said that it was a personal project,” Kurt said, excitement slowly filling him. “Gold apple seeds for a golden apple.”

“And that’s what Atlas is after,” Blaine said quietly. “But wait, that means that he knows about the seeds which means--”

“There’s a mole at MI6,” Kurt said quietly. “Someone betrayed me.”

“And you were supposed to have them,” Blaine realized, looking paler. “You were supposed to have them on that trip but you didn’t. You were going to test them out on the Paris system. Someone _knew_ that, but...” He leaned back, covering his mouth. “Oh god, what did I _do_?”

Kurt stared at him. “What are you talking--”

“You were right. You were right before, it _was_ my fault.” Blaine looked up at him with horror in his eyes. “It’s my fault you got hurt, I’m so _so_ sorry, please, you have to believe me--”

“Blaine, Blaine! Stop, slow down, _explain_.” Kurt grabbed his arm, trying to figure out what the hell he was talking about. 

“You were going to test the seeds. You would’ve had complete control of the Paris system, if they’re as formidable as you said. You might have seen the attack coming, but you took the chess square that I’d been playing with, which was the _one_ square that didn’t have seeds in it because I’d taken them out.”

“Why would you do that?” Kurt asked quietly. A horrible idea occurred to him that he kept tamped down, waiting to _hear_ the worst before he assumed the worst. 

Blaine looked over at him. He looked like he was in agony. “There’s...maybe something I haven’t told you. I tried hinting at it because I wanted you to realize it yourself, but...”

Kurt kept the panic down even as his mind was shouting. “What?”

Blaine swallowed. “Let’s just say...there’s a reason that this specific audio file is the most encrypted thing on your hard drive and it has nothing to do with the net seeds.”

Kurt grew cold, wondering what could be so terrible that he’d buried it deep on his hard drive so that no one could find it. “Go on.”

Blaine hesitated and then he leaned over slowly, pressing play.  

_“They’re called net seeds, but yes, essentially. Now I’m curious as to how you know that, since they’re a personal project that I started two months ago and I’ve never shown them to you.”_

_“I’m sure that you told me about them in passing once or twice...”_

_“While you were in Germany and it was almost impossible to maintain a secure line?”_

_“What exactly are you getting at, Kurt?”_

There was a brief silence. Kurt glanced over at Blaine, trying to get a read on him, but Blaine was just resolutely watching the screen.

_“Well, I decided to bring some with me here, test them out on the new security, so I grabbed one of the boxes to bring.”_

Another pause.

_“Now imagine my surprise when I find no seeds in the box. And I realize that there’s something else inside.”_

Kurt tensed, mind flying in a million directions. Like--

_“More curiously, that it’s a ring.”_

Kurt’s mind halted sharply in place.

_“Well there’s a perfectly good explanation for that.”_

_“Is there?”_  

_“Yes. Greece.”_

_“Greece?”_

_“Yes, Greece. The ring belonged to a Greek aristocrat who was using it in a string of murders to topple the government, and I was sent to retrieve the ring, but I needed a place to hide it so--”_

_“Blaine Devon Anderson, that has to be one of the worst lies you’ve ever told me.”_

_“Well, I tried. You’re the one who ruined the surprise.”_

_“Wait, wait, wait. Backtrack. So the ring is for...”_

_“You know what it’s for. Why do you think I wanted to take you out for dinner before you left?”_

_“I... No. No, you weren’t--”_ Kurt’s frazzled spluttering in the past mirrored his thoughts in the present. _“You weren’t actually going too--but... No, you couldn’t have been--”_

_“About to propose?”_

There was a pause. 

_“I guess I just don’t understand why? Like, is it because you think this is what I want? Or is it an apology or--”_

_“Kurt, no. It’s--okay. I was thinking about our fight. And I know that the reason you push yourself so hard is because you worry. You worry about keeping everyone safe, and you worry about the fact that you’re the youngest Quartermaster in the history of MI6 and that...that there are other things you don’t want to admit to me that you worry about, but I know that they’re there, Kurt.”_

Another pause.

_“And when you said that my job has a short life expectancy--”_

_“Blaine, I didn’t--”_

_“No, no. You were right. Double-oh agents don’t have a long shelf life. That’s why we come and go, but our titles stay the same. And I don’t know how long I have, or how many more times I can cheat death, but I know that for however long or short that period of time is, I want to spend it with you. Only you._

_“To paraphrase a certain Quartermaster, I want you to be mine. I want to have a part of you that you don’t have to share with anyone else. I want something that’s stable and concrete and solid. Genuine romance, not just practiced seduction techniques. And I want to be the person to give all those things to you as well.”_

More silence, and then: _“That still doesn’t explain why the ring was in my chess square!”_  

A laugh. _“Well, the plan had been to start out with a lavish dinner, get fairly tipsy, then undoubtably wind up back here because there’d be some random thing that you’d have to check on, at which point I would use your lowered defenses to challenge you to a chess game.”_  

_“A chess game? An_ **_actual_ ** _chess game?”_

_“Yes. I was going to maneuver you into capturing which ever piece I had on the square, then probably say something incredibly cheesy about you capturing my heart, before opening the box and proposing.”_

A pause. _“That might be one of the most romantic things I’ve ever heard of.”_

_“Does this hypothetical romantic gesture have an answer?”_

_“Oh please. So straight forward and to the point.”_

_“Just like a double-oh. And to be fair, I_ **_had_ ** _been planning to do this in person, not over the phone.”_

_“Well I fully expect you to do it in person, in exactly the same way. Though I do like this. I’ve been recording the whole thing so that I can listen to it over and over. Maybe blast it on all the speakers in MI6. I’ll make it Smythe’s ringtone.”_

_“Devious_ **_and_ ** _sexy. I knew there was a reason I wanted to marry you.”_

_“Yes, well. You’ll get your answer once you deliver on a full scale proposal. I want flowers, Anderson. Singing. Dancing. Extravagance. The whole nine yards.”_

_“As you wish, Q. You know, Paris and London aren’t that far apart. It wouldn’t be too tricky to maybe nick an MI6 plane--”_

_“I’ll leave the details up to you, but if you try to get me on a jet, this engagement will end faster than I can beat Crawford at chess.”_

_“This engagement? I haven’t received an answer yet. And if_ **_someone_ ** _had made me his co-field agent on this trip, I could’ve done it all by now.”_

_“I’ll be back tomorrow, and this barely qualifies as a mission. I’ve been eating egg croissants and working ten hours a day. This is practically vacation.”_

_“Is it horribly cavemanish of me to admit that I don’t like you being in the field without me?”_

_“Not_ **_horribly_ ** _. More sweetish and worrisome. I’m fine, Blaine. Not all missions have to end in bloodshed and gunfire--”_

_“Kur--”_

_“I’m switching over to the Q Branch speakers. This is most likely just me overreacting but... I’ll call you after, okay?”_

_“Okay.”_

The audio file ended. 

The silence stretched between the two on the bed, Kurt refusing to look away from the screen and Blaine refusing to look away from Kurt. 

Finally it was Blaine who broke. “Kurt?”

Kurt opened his mouth and then closed it. 

“Kurt, say something.” 

He opened his mouth again. “I’m your Quartermaster.”

“Yes.”

“I’m your fiance.”

“Yes.”

“I’m the one you lost.”

“Yes.”

“How?”

“What?”

“How?” Kurt asked, finally turning to look at Blaine, his eyes tortured. “How is this even remotely true?”

“What are you talking about?”

“It doesn’t add up!” Kurt said desperately, his mind loud and yelling and trying to process the information but large red ERROR signs were flashing everywhere. “It’s not even _remotely_ plausible!”

“What isn’t?” Blaine leaned forward. 

“That you’d love me!” Kurt burst out, and then it was like the dam had been breached. “I’ve racked my brains on it over and over and it just doesn’t make any sense! You’re a double-oh agent, you’re supposed to seduce people and that’s fine. I get that that might have happened with us when we first started out and I don’t blame you or anything, but how do you go from that to falling in love with me to wanting to _marry_ me?”

“Kurt...” Blaine stared at him. “Kurt, you’re _amazing_ \--”

“I’m amazing for Lima, Ohio. But everyone you deal with is amazing and one of a kind and it doesn’t make sense that it’d be _me_. _What_ about me was so special? Why did you fall for me?”

“Because I just did!” Blaine exclaimed. “Because you were there for me when nobody else was, because you looked out for me without me even needing me to ask to. Because no matter how _brilliant_ you are at chess you would never admit that you’re terrible at poker. Because you turned bright red sitting in front of me in only your underwear when we played strip poker but you refused to stop playing. Because after I kissed you for the first time you made a terrible pun and giggled for ten minutes. Because you would break into my apartment to make strawberry souffles. Because no matter how hard you tried to pretend, you needed me as much as I needed you. Because you crashed MI6’s servers for me. Because you _sacrificed_ yourself for me rather than let me be put to death. 

“Because, Kurt Elizabeth Hummel, you are the only person on this earth that I could have _ever_ fallen in love with.”

The air had left Kurt’s body and all that stayed in its wake were his thoughts, all loud and bouncing and contradicting and he didn’t quite know what to do with them. 

“What was the password?” Kurt asked quietly.

“What?”

“The password. To my computer.”

Blaine stared at him. “ _Stalemate_.”

The silence resumed.

“Kurt,” Blaine said finally. “Kurt, please say something.”

The words were there, and then more words, and different words, and a thousand different things he could have said warred across his tongue. “I’d like to use my request now.”

Blaine’s eyebrows raised slightly in surprise, his expression still guarded. “Name it.”

The request out of his mouth wasn’t one that he’d thought of or planned, but in the moment it was the one thing he wanted more than anything. So he looked away and blurted out. “I need you to stop me thinking.” 

It was silly, it was embarrassing, and it made him sound vulnerable. There was no guarantee that Blaine would even understand what he meant or think it was a problem or know how to grant his request. 

And Blaine had been silent for way too long. 

Kurt looked back up at him, steeling himself for confusion or skepticism or doubt or anything except what he actually got.

Which was Blaine looking at him with a burning look, like he’d just just offered him a popsicle in the middle of a desert. Kurt opened his mouth to ask if Blaine was okay, before Blaine let out a low, “As you command,” which Kurt found he enjoyed the sound of perhaps a little _too_ much. 

And then he found himself on his back, his mouth on Blaine’s and Blaine holding his hands tightly over his head. Kurt’s mind tried to piece together how he went from his request to on his back and was about to ask what had just happened, but then Blaine’s nails dug sharply into his wrists, tugging them. 

Kurt’s mind went blissfully blank. 

***

Later they were lying tangled up in sheets, and thoughts were slowly starting to filter back into Kurt’s mind. 

“How did we meet?” he asked, resting his cheek on top of Blaine’s head. 

Blaine mumbled something on top of him before tilting his head up to prop his chin on Kurt’s chest. “I was on the run from MI6, hiding a ring for the then Princess Brittany. My bike broke down on the side of the road just outside of Lima and you helped me fix it. And I ended up sticking around Lima to hide out.”

Kurt snorted. “I guess it is out of the way enough. What happened with the ring?”

“Well, you figured out where it was and managed to divert MI6 for a little bit. They sent 005 after me and there was a weird not-love-triangle between us. We played strip poker a lot and I stole half your wardrobe. We played chess a handful of times where you thoroughly pummeled me after our first game which ended in stalemate. Then we were shoved on a plane to England and 006 shot you. We might have fallen from said plane, gotten into a car chase, then I was tortured and you got pissed and effectively shut down MI6 and that impressed M enough to fire the old Quartermaster and hire you instead.” 

Kurt stared at him. “Wait, hang on, we’ve already played chess together and we stalemated?”

“Seriously? That’s the part that you’re focusing on?”

“Did you just...play the exact same game with me _all over again_?”

Blaine at least looked moderately sheepish. “Maybe?”

Kurt frowned. “So you knew that it was going to be a stalemate.”

“Pretty much.”

Kurt glared. “So you could’ve asked for anything had we ended in stalemate, but you chose to keep it fair.”

“Well, part of me was hoping that your request would be to know more about our relationship,” Blaine shrugged. “Though I must say, I much preferred the alternative.” 

Kurt snorted, rolling his eyes. “It was going to be but you kind of jumped the gun. So wait, _that’s_ why my password is stalemate?”

“I told you that you’re sentimental,” Blaine grinned, kissing the side of his jaw.

Kurt pressed his lips together to hide his smile. Another issue pressed forward into his mind. “Wait a minute...” He leaned down and took off his ring, narrowing his eyes at the scrawl around the inside. “Is that what this says? Stalemate?” 

“Yeah. I always kind of thought it was a depressing word, like you can’t go any further and have to give up, but you always liked it. You said it felt like meeting your match, like an unstoppable force meeting an unmovable object, and all that stuff. Two opposing sides forced to meld together in a big mash of grey.”

Kurt stared at him skeptically. “ _I_ said that?”

“Well...you might have been completely sloshed at the time, but yeah.” 

Kurt rolled his eyes, head falling back into the pillow as Blaine turned and started kissing his collarbone. “Wait...you proposed with an ultra high frequency single-digit sonic agitator unit? How much of a nerd are you?”

“I think my fiance’s the one who’s the nerd,” Blaine said, flicking Kurt lightly on the forehead. “Plus it’s also a cyber magnetic storage device.”

“What?” Kurt asked excitedly, his eyes lighting up. “Are you telling me that I’ve had a storage device, an agitator unit, _and_ the password to my USB drive on my finger for the past eight months and I _haven’t even noticed_?”

“Yeah, you kind of dropped the ball on that one,” Blaine shrugged with a smirk, which earned him a sharp jab in the side from Kurt.

“I’m sorry,” Kurt murmured quietly. 

“For what?” Blaine frowned. 

“For dying. Especially right after you proposed. That must have been awful.”

Blaine grew quite still. “It wasn’t your fault.”

“That doesn’t stop me from being sorry,” Kurt said gently. 

“I’m sorry too.”

“For what?” 

“Not being there.”

“That wasn’t your fault either.”

“Yeah, but we were having a stupid fight. And if I’d apologized sooner then you would’ve asked me to be on that mission with you instead of 002. Plus I was the one who impeded you from having the seeds--”

“But if I’d had the seeds, there’s no guarantee that I would have used them in time,” Kurt countered. “In fact, I could have been killed and then Atlas or whoever attacked me would have the seeds. But instead, I’m somehow alive and the seeds are...” Kurt broke off with a frown. “Wait, where did you put the seeds?”

“In another one of the chess squares in your office,” Blaine said. 

“So...they’ve just been sitting there this entire time for anyone to take?”

“No, because...” Realization lit Blaine’s eyes. “ _That’s_ why you sealed your office. You didn’t want anyone getting to them.”

“I _sealed_ it?”

“If anyone tries to force their way in, it’ll combust, and it’s password protected,” Blaine nodded. “I tried guessing a few, but it’s the one code I can’t break.”

“So the seeds have been safe?” Kurt realized. “But if there was a mole in MI6--”

“Then someone probably has put two and two together than the seeds are in the one place that they can’t get to,” Blaine nodded.

“And we can’t just call to ask someone to get it--”

“Because they don’t know the password. And we don’t know who we can trust.”

“Which means I have to go there directly and break the code,” Kurt sighed. “Oh god, we’re going to break into MI6, aren’t we?”

“Afraid so.”

“Perfect. Just bloody...perfect.”


End file.
